Paleontologists pointed out that the ancestors of snakes also had feet.

Nicholas Vidal, a paleontologist at Pennsylvania State University, and his colleagues recently published a paper pointing out that the ancestors of snakes were not aquatic reptiles, but terrestrial reptiles with feet, and their feet gradually disappeared during evolution to adapt to land life.

For a long time, scientists have two views on the ancestors of snakes: one view holds that the ancestors of snakes were aquatic animals, because from a biological point of view, snakes are very similar to an extinct aquatic monitor lizard named Mosalon; Another view is that the ancestors of snakes are terrestrial animals, which originally had feet, and these feet later degenerated and disappeared. Nicholas Vidal and his colleagues compared the DNA of 17 species of modern snakes with that of 19 species of aquatic lizards, and found that they were not related by blood, thus ruling out the possibility that the ancestors of snakes were Mosarosaurus. Terrestrial large lizards and reptiles all have feet, so it can be inferred that the ancestors of snakes also had feet. It seems that sometimes "gilding the lily" is not necessarily wrong.

A snake has feet, but it is not a snake without feet!

Li Shizhen's notes on seclusion under the chapter "Agkistrodon" in Compendium of Materia Medica: "Snake's feet are burned to make them hot, and then filled with wine." The paragraph "Youyang Miscellaneous" says: "If you burn a snake with Sang Mu, it will be enough."

On this issue, some netizens said that I don't know if it's true or not when I saw the snake sticking out its feet during roasting ~