Paleobiologist David Martill from the University of Portsmouth in the U.K. found the four-legged snake fossil in Solnhofen, Germany’s Bürgermeister Müller Museum in 2012; the relic was apparently ...

Imagine a world millions of years ago, teeming with creatures unlike anything we see today. Among them slithered animals that would one day become the mysterious, legless wonders we now call snakes.

The publication of a paper by researchers in Europe describing a Brazilian four-legged-snake fossil in Science this week has sparked controversy and angered many in the Brazilian paleontological ...