snakes

If a venomous snake bites you in Africa, you're likely to survive when you're near a hospital. That might not be the case next year.

The ribs of a 240 million-year-old fossil hold clues to how the first turtle shell evolved. And its skull shape seems closer to that of lizards and snakes than to an ancestor of dinosaurs and birds.

Genetic sleuthing and comparisons of recently discovered fossils with living snakes point to a "protosnake" ancestor that likely had tiny hind legs and lived about 120 million years ago.