'Blind snakes moved to Madagascar from India 100mn years ago'

The blurry-eyed wrigglers, which feel their way through underground homes by sensing chemicals through their skin, comprise about 260 different species and form the largest group of the world's worm-like snakes -- scolecophidians.

Most organisms living on the southern continents that were once Gondwana didn't appear until after the continent split apart, according to the new genetic research, appeared in the journal Biology Letters.

"We've identified living organisms (the blind snakes) that trace back to an ancient continent that split apart and then carried these snakes with them," Blair Hedges, lead researcher at Penn State University, told LiveScience.
According to the scientists, some 150 years ago, Gondwana divided into East Gondwana (the landmasses of Antarctica, India, Madagascar, and Australia) and West Gondwana (the landmasses of South America and Africa).
Later, East Gondwana further divided into a new paleolandmass -- called by the researchers "Indigascar" (India plus Madagascar) -- and another comprised of Australia and Antarctica.

"That mini-continent (India) moved northward after it split from Madagascar, carrying blind snakes with it and eventually colliding with Asia (causing the Himalayas), roughly 50 million years ago," Hedges said.
"Then some of resident blind snakes left and dispersed over land to other areas in southern Asia."

The creatures in other parts of the world must have rafted across oceans aboard floating flotsam at least once during their evolutionary history, the scientists said.
The small burrowing animals spend most of their lives in the soil underground, eating the eggs and larvae of ants and termites.
"These blind snakes eat very small things, and they eat a lot of them," Hedges said. "They'll go into a termite mound and just gobble up dozens and dozens of eggs and larvae."

In fact, they have specialised jaws that work like a conveyor belt, pulling in larvae and eggs into their mouths as if at a checkout counter, he said.
However, scientists are perplexed over the underground lifestyle of the creatures as they found nothing barring some mysterious underground passages. There are almost no fossils of blind snakes known so far that makes it difficult to understand their evolution.
To find out how the blind snakes managed to spread from continent to continent, Hedges and his colleagues analysed 96 blind snake species for five genes, particularly looking at mutations in those genes.

By counting up the mutations, which is not a simple process and so involved special computer software, the team could figure out how long ago the species lived.
The results were then calibrated with fossils and geological evidence to firm up the timing. The team found that splits between species were as old as 150 million years ago, when Gondwana was first breaking apart.
The blind snake species in Madagascar and India were traced back to about 100 million years ago, when Indigascar was breaking up.