![]() One of the combatants, a king cobra, lay. (SOUNDBITE OF TROUBLE SONG, "SNAKE EYES") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. Billions of cicadas, known as Brood X, are coming out of the ground in 15 states this summer, and many predators will feast, from your cat and dog to rats and venomous snakes, in a dining frenzy. Recently, a lethal battle between two scaly titans ended in a draw, leaving behind a twisted, grisly scene. I'm totally stealing it because I think it's a great term. I'm going to start referring to it as the Age of Snakes. But the authors of this study point out, we could just as easily call the Cenozoic the Age of Snakes because almost all the same things happen. ![]() RUANE: The Cenozoic is often referred to as the age of mammals because it's the time period in which mammals diversify at a really high rate. And essentially, those varied diets may be one reason for snakes' diversity today.ĬHANG: As for that diversity, the study also dares to suggest that this post-dinosaur era that we are living in today - the Cenozoic Era - might need a new nickname. ![]() There's snakes that eat nothing but worms and slugs. These snakes mostly eat mammals such as mice. ![]() RUANE: There's snakes that specialize in eating things like scorpions and centipedes, in eating freshly molted crayfish, caterpillars. After striking, the snake lets the prey go and later follows the scent trail to track it down and eat it. She is curator of herpetology at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. MCCAMMON: Sara Ruane was not involved in the work. It's sort of the perfect shape and package, if you're a snake, to swallow right down. SARA RUANE: Lots of snakes love to eat other snakes. But we do know there are about 4,000 species today, and they eat everything. RABOSKY: Snakes have sort of managed to do this remarkable evolutionary explosion in - of diets that you don't see in other groups of reptiles.ĬHANG: Now, we don't know for sure how many kinds of snakes there were before the dinosaurs disappeared. It was the snakes' ability to snack on an ever-expanding menu of different creatures. It wasn't just all the empty space the dinosaurs left behind. MCCAMMON: Their study, out today in the journal PLOS Biology, provides a clue as to why snakes exploded in number. Here's Rabosky.ĭANIEL RABOSKY: They are almost as diverse as mammals, and yet they're sort of this big, missing piece in our understanding of how animal evolution and especially vertebrate evolution has unfolded in the past 100 million years. He recently analyzed this frenzy of snake evolution, along with Professor Daniel Rabosky of the University of Michigan. That is Michael Grundler, a post-doctoral researcher at UCLA. MICHAEL GRUNDLER: Snakes essentially exploded in their ecological diversity. But it opened a window for other creatures to flourish, like mammals and birds, but also snakes. Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid shut the door on the dinosaurs. ![]()
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