We are sitting here with an extraordinary fossil
that we have recreated in three dimensions as a sculpture,
and this is a fossil that comes from
67 million year old sediments from India.
And what it shows us is an example of
behavior being captured in the fossil record.
We have a snake caught
in the act of feeding on dinosaur hatchlings.
The fossil that this sculpture is based on
was found in Western India, in 1984,
by an Indian scientist named Dhananjay Mohabey.
And getting the fossil from 1984 to now
has been a long odyssey that involved a series of discoveries.
When it was first found,
it was a difficult fossil to interpret,
the bones were still covered in sediments,
and the person who discovered it, Dhananjay Mohabey,
interpreted that we had eggs,
and we had bones of some animal,
and he interpreted that animal to be a dinosaur.
In fact, some of the bones were bones of dinosaurs,
but some of the other bones
were bones of a different animal,
and it wasn’t recognized
until I visited the collections of Dhananjay Mohabey in 2001.
And when I went to his lab,
I had asked to see this specimen
because I was interested in seeing this dinosaur hatchling with the eggs,
and when I looked at it, I was stunned,
because I recognized that
some of the bones that were interpreted, may be being dinosaur bones,
were in fact the bones of a snake.
And we could recognize those bones as being snake bones
because they have characteristic articulations that lock the bone.
So snakes have very twisty bodies,
but in fact they have very little mobility between vertebrae,
a lot of their mobility is because they have
a little bit of freedom in between hundreds of vertebrae.
So in about 2001,
we figured out that this was a really exceptional fossil,
because snakes are extraordinarily rare during the dinosaur era.
We have probably a half dozen snakes
that are known with skulls and bodies.
We have lots of snakes in other places,
but the ones that have skulls and bodies,
the ones that are really good specimens,
come from a couple of different areas,
and so far none had come from India.
So I knew that it was an important fossil,
and the fact that this snake was sitting next to dinosaur eggs,
and perhaps next to dinosaur bones,
meant that there was perhaps something else
that we could find from this fossil.
So that began kind of a long odyssey,
from 2001 till here we are in 2010,
where Dhananjay and I worked together.
I immediately told him that I thought it was a snake
and it was important, and he said, let's do something with it.
He had been sort of waiting for someone to take interest in the specimen.
We spent probably three or four years
getting permission from the Government of India
to borrow the specimen.
And we got permission,
we brought this specimen to University of Michigan,
where it was cleaned painstakingly over the course of a year,
with needles, taking grain by grain off of the specimen.
And when the specimen was cleaned,
it revealed an extraordinarily fossil,
that I had no idea was going to be underneath some of the sediments.
So we found a skull.
We found a body of a snake that was coiled.
So the skull was sitting on top of the coil,
and inside the coil of the snake
was a set of fragmented eggshells that you see here.
And as it turns out,
there are two other eggs, this one and this one,
from the same side that were intact,
so they weren’t crushed at all.
And so something must have crushed this egg.
And we later learned,
on the basis of the presence of a hatchling that we saw right next to it,
that this was probably an egg that was recently hatched,
and it's crushed because the animal that left the egg,
left the egg fragmented.
The snake probably was attracted to this egg that was moving
and the hatchling that was coming out of it,
and the moment we see captured here in the sculpture
is the moment prior to preservation in the fossil record.
So it's the moment right before a big plug
of what sediment would have covered this up
and frozen this instant in time
for the rest of us to enjoy in the 21 Century.
The fossils of Sanajeh and the Sauropod
and the eggs are now in India.
We had a short-term agreement
to bring them here to clean them,
and then we returned them, and so they are now in India,
in perpetuity, in a collection,
so anybody who wants to study them can study them.
But we have research casts here
that allow anybody who doesn’t have the facility
to go to India to study a pretty good cast
of the specimen here at Michigan.
And so it's really an incredibly rewarding fossil,
and it's even more rewarding
because of how long it took to find it
and to actually describe it.
So I am happy that at the end of 10 years for me
and 30 years for Dhananjay
this fossil has finally been described
and will get the kind of notoriety in future study that it deserves.