Najash is an extinct genus of basal snake from the Late Cretaceous Candeleros Formation of Patagonia. Like a number of other Cretaceous and living snakes it retained hindlimbs, but Najash is unusual in having well-developed legs that extend outside the rib cage, and a pelvis connected to the spine.
Najash is an extinct genus of basal snake from the Late Cretaceous Candeleros Formation of Patagonia. Like a number of other Cretaceous and living snakes it retained hindlimbs, but Najash is unusual in having well-developed legs that extend outside the rib cage, and a pelvis connected to the spine.
== Discovery and description == Fossils of Najash were found in the terrestrial Candeleros Formation, in Rio Negro Province, Argentina, and date to roughly 90 million years ago. The skull and spine of Najash show primitive features that resemble other Cretaceous snakes, such as Dinilysia patagonica and Madtsoiidae. Also, several characteristics of the neck and tail of Najash and Dinilysia patagonica show how the body plan of snakes evolved from a lizard-like ancestor.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).