Boipeba, the earliest blind snake, was a giant

[Halichoeres]

Relatively speaking. At a meter long, it's substantially larger than most living blind snakes (Scolecophidia). Meet Boipeba tayasuensis, (Tupi-Guarani and Latin "flat snake from Taiaçu municipality") from the Upper Cretaceous of Brazil, the oldest blind snake known.

Without this data point, ancestral state reconstruction (a character optimization procedure similar to phylogenetic bracketing) would have predicted a smaller size for early scolecophidians, but this find suggests they started out relatively large and then got smaller the more thoroughly fossorial they got.


Artwork by Jorge Blanco, with Montealtosuchus in the background:


Schineider Fachini et al., open access in iScience: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589004220310312

[Libraraptor]

Another interesting information, thank you @Halichoeres !

[Shonisaurus]

With you Halichoeres and the article links you share we learn a lot about the biology of extinct animals. This article about that blind snake is exciting and interesting.