The fossilized skeleton of Clarisse, a 50 million-year-old snake fossil from Wyoming, recently shared a lot with the medical community. The entire chunk of limestone that Clarisse is preserved in underwent a procedure at the United Methodist Hospital in Houston, intended to examine the evolutionary shift of eating small bites and swallowing whole prey is one of the primary interests of scientists.

aher, professor and curator of the collections of herpetology and paleontology at the Museu de Zoologia of the Universidade de São Paulo in Brazil, worked with the Museum of Natural Science in Houston to get Clarisse to Methodist for the scan. He believes Clarisse could be an evolutionary link between snakes who take a lot of small bites to eat their prey and snakes who swallow their prey whole.
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Clarisse is the best preserved Caenozoic snake known in a U.S. scientific collection. According to preliminary analysis, this snake is believed to be closely related to Boavus indelmani, a booid snake described in the late 1930s. Zaher and the Houston museum hoped that getting a look at the underside of this unique fossil, as well as the inside of bones like the skull would shed some light on the evolutionary history of the species, and its relationship to booid snakes (like pythons and boas).

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