an artist's impression
As extinct snakes go, Madtsoia is less important as an individual genus than as the eponymous representative of the family of snake ancestors known as madtsoiidae, which had a worldwide distribution from the late Cretaceous period all the way up to the Pleistocene epoch, about two million years ago. However, as you can surmise from this snake's unusually wide geographic and temporal distribution (its various species span about 90 million years) not to mention the fact that it's represented in the fossil record almost exclusively by vertebrae. paleontologists are far from sorting out the evolutionary relationships of Madtsoia and the madtsoiida and modern snakes. Other madtsoid snakes, at least provisionally, include Gigantophis, Sanajeh and most controversially the two-legged snake ancestor Najash