It sounds like a B-movie plot, but paleontologist found a 67-million-year old fossilized snake lurking among fossilized sauropod dinosaur eggs in a posture that suggests the snake was preying on the hatchlings.
The 11-foot-long-snake was coiled around a broken eggshell with a fossil dinosaur hatchling nearby. The fossils were from a locality in India known for abundant dinosaur eggs that may have been a sauropod nesting ground.
The sauropods dinosaurs excavated a shallow depression and laid their clutch of 6 to 12 eggs, and probably covered the eggs with soil or vegetation and left the eggs to hatch, as do modern reptiles like sea turtles. Predators would be drawn to this bounty of prey, but in this case, both predator and prey were buried alive by a sudden avalanche of sediment. It’s a single moment, frozen in time.
“Predation upon Hatchling Dinosaurs by a New Snake from the Late Cretaceous of India,”/Jeffrey A. Wilson, Dhananjay M. Mohabey, Shanan E. Peters, Jason J. Head/Public Library of Science Biology, Mar. 2010, Vol. 8, Issue 3.
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