By Amy Maxmen
“How’d you get those newfangled teeth?” hissed the petite garter snake to the venomous cobra. “Same way that you got yours,” cobra replied. All fangs — no matter their size, shape or position — descend from a single evolutionary event, new evidence from snake embryos suggests.
“I’m sky high on this piece of work,” comments Ken Kardong, a biologist at WashingtonStateUniversity in Pullman, who has been studying snake evolution for more than 30 years. “This will become a textbook example in evolutionary biology identifying how development produces diversity in the natural world that natural selection can then act on.”
The new study, led by Freek Vonk of LeidenUniversity in The Netherlands, reveals that snakes didn’t reinvent the wheel with each new version of their venom-delivery systems. The report appears in the July 31 Nature.