Ancient snakes living on Madagascar

'Blindsnakes are not very pretty, are rarely noticed, and are often mistaken for earthworms,' admits Blair Hedges, professor of biology at Penn State University. 'Nonetheless, they tell a very interesting evolutionary story.' Hedges and Nicolas Vidal, of the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris, are co-leaders of the team that discovered that blindsnakes are one of the few groups of organisms that inhabited Madagascar when it broke from India about 100 million years ago and are still living today. The results of their study will be published in the 31 March 2010 issue of the Royal Society journal Biology Letters...

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