80-million-year-old snake fossil reveals early serpents thrived in multiple habitats

Eighty million years ago, long before the modern world took shape, a small snake was already doing something remarkable: refusing to be defined by a single way of life. The fossil of Tametara mirim, an early Cretaceous serpent, has revealed through preserved brain structure that ancient snakes were environmental generalists — equally at home underground, on land, and in water — upending the long-held assumption that early snake lineages succeeded by specializing. This discovery invites us to reconsider a foundational question in evolutionary biology: whether the great diversification of life i