The ancestors of today's snakes sported full-fledged arms and legs, according to a new study which found that genetic mutations caused the reptiles to lose their limbs over 100 million years ago. Researchers described a stretch of DNA involved in limb formation that is mutated in snakes. In snakes, it's broken," said Axel Visel, from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the US. Even when they inserted the ZRS from fish, whose fins are structurally very different from limbs, the mice developed normal limbs. To identify the mutations in the snakes' ZRS that were responsible for its inactivation during snake evolution, the researchers took a closer look at the evolutionary history of individual sequence changes.

Source: dna October 27, 2016 04:26 UTC