In Fossil Find, 'Anaconda' Meets 'Jurassic Park'

NOTE: The scientist who made this discovery, Jeff Wilson, will be writing about it himself here on 3QD on Monday.

Christpher Joyce at National Public Radio:

Scientists have discovered a macabre death scene that took place 67 million years ago. The setting was a nest, in which a baby dinosaur had just hatched from an egg, only to face an 11-foot-long snake waiting to devour it.

The moment was frozen forever when, apparently, the nest was buried in a sudden avalanche of mud or sand and everything was fossilized.

The discovery was made by Jeffrey Wilson, a professor at the University of Michigan. He had heard about the amazing fields of dinosaur eggs discovered in India.

Wilson visited a scientist in India who showed him a broken, fossilized egg encased in a briefcase-sized block of stone. He leaned in to take a closer look and saw something else.

"I was stunned when I saw it," Wilson says, "because, sort of leaping out at me, were the peculiar articulations between the vertebrae of a snake, and so I had no idea that there would be a snake there but there it was sitting in front of me."

More here.