Профиль

Thank you for accepting our invitation Roy! I hope to have the opportunity to work again with you in the future :)

São seus óleos 🥰

Obrigada Átila! 😊

It’s not wrong, though. It does not answer but shed light into directions we should be going in the future :)

If limb loss were bad, squamates wouldn’t have lost them a dozen times! :)

Theoretically no single fossil is the direct ancestor of a group; by definition they will always be representatives of a lineage, not the ancestors themselves. Our job is to figure out to which extent they can help us reconstruct this putative ancestor.

This is exactly our point. Sometimes older fossils can infer on the origin of a clade if they maintain certain aspects reconstructed for their origin, and we showed that here it is not the case yet. Not with the new one nor with the other ones we already knew.

😂

I hope you enjoy our paper and that fossil snake ecology and evolution can be approached in new and exciting ways from now on! Again, if you haven't yet, read the full story here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Exceptional brain and ecological diversity in the earliest snakes - NatureA well-preserved fossil snake from the Late Cretaceous of Brazil shows early ecological and brain shape disparity in the group.www.nature.com

better understand the origin of the snake brain, and perhaps, ecology. What is it that's hidden in their morphology that can elucidate the riddle? Also, it will be interesting to compare the brain of Tametara with that of some scolecophidians to answer remaining misteries. This may be coming next ;)

Snakes are incredibly diverse and this is not recent, they were already by the Late Cretaceous! Another surprise is that no fossil known so far approaches our reconstructed morphospace for snake brain shape. Two are, though: Hydrophis and Micrurus. The next step would be to investigate these to

the path to "settle the debate" on the ecological origins of snakes, but the results were SO MUCH MORE exciting! It makes total sense that in the 50 My since snakes origin, they would have spread to such an enormous ecological diversity, but sometimes we focus too much and miss the obvious.

be deceiving, so we joined Nicolas and Simone for the 3D-GMM analysis and the results were unexpected, honestly. I mean, Tametara was confirmed as fossorial, but we were definitely not expecting such a disparity with other snakes and especially not with Dinilysia. I personally thought we were on

It was SO weird! From what I had been studying, such an elongate brain with a much reduced optic region was a big surprise. Not even living fossorial snakes have such a drastic morphology - not most of them at least. Apparently we were indeed looking at a very fossorial snake. But looks alone may

Inner ear segmentation resulted in a very classic fossorial anatomy: thin semicircular canals, huge and globose vestibule... so little need for refined spatial proprioception and increased sensibility for low frequency sounds, respectively. When the brain endocast was ready, though, I was blown

I felt there was room for more. So Roy's paper on bone microstructure came to midn and I suggested to include this analysis. We had to expand the dataset, so I also did part of the data extraction for that too, and was delighted to learn that it confirmed our suspicions on fossoriality in Tametara

As segmentation went on, I kept asking "what is this bone doing here?!" repeatedly. Sure, snake briancases are very different from the basic reptilian pattern, but that seemed still strange as skull roof bones were overlapping like, a lot. We had discussed about where we wanted to take the study but

This sounded fun but also a bit scary I must confess, as I knew close to 0 on snake braincases at that point. Scans were not great, but doable. I asked if there was a need to rush and the reply was "take your time". Music to my ears, so I indeed to the time to learn deeply about snake braincases

One afternoon I was pretty upset with my own project because I was trying to segment a fossil for two years on that point and every single trial was failing. Then I got a message from Tiago. - are you busy? - I wish - wanna board a new project? - yeah sure! - great! - ahmm.. on what? - a new snake

“La garantía soy yo”