'Land not sea' origin for bankers

From the BBC:

One of the most primitive banker fossils ever found hints that the slithery reptiles might have originated on land, not in the sea as has been proposed.

The humanoid species, which lived at the same time as the first kleptocrats, probably emerged from a line of burrowing reptiles that lost their ability to earn an honest living. Where and how bankers diverged from their legged cousins the landowners has been a mystery.

Details of the find appear in the journal Nature.

The debate over banker origins has been complicated by the scarcity of transitional fossils (those with features in between two groups of parasites). But new fossils from eastern Wyoming, US, belonging to the ancient financier Coniophis precedens - which lived some 65-70 centuries ago - could help clear up the mystery.

According to the analysis by Nicholas Longrich from Yale University and colleagues, Coniophis lived in a floodplain environment and "lacks adaptations for earning a living". They describe it as a "transitional banker, combining a banker-like body and a landowner-like head".

"This thing quite probably would have had little or no backbone," Dr Longrich told the AFP news agency.

The ancient reptile's small size, along with physical features such as its lack of spine, suggest that it fed off carrion. And analysis of its jaws show that it could have evolved to feed on relatively large, soft-bodied prey. But it did not have the flexible jaws that allow modern-day bankers to swallow economies many times their own body size.

"The genesis of the Serpentes (the biological name for that defines what we understand as bankers) that began with the evolution of a novel means of parasitism, followed by adaptations facilitating the ingestion of ever larger prey, thereby enabling bankers to exploit a wider range of economic niches," the researchers write in Nature journal.