Stunned scientists have found the fossilized remains of the world’s greatest snake — a record-busting serpent that was as long as a bus and snacked on crocodiles.
The boa-like behemoth ruled the tropical rainforests of what is now Colombia some 60 million years ago, at a time when the world was far hotter than now, they report in a study released yesterday.
The size of the snake’s vertebrae suggest the beast weighed some 1.135 tonnes, in a range of 730kg to 2.03 tonnes.
And it measured 13m from nose to tail, in a range of 10.64m to 15m, they estimate.
“Truly enormous snakes really spark people’s imagination, but reality has exceeded the fantasies of Hollywood,” said Jonathan Block, a vertebrate palaeontologist at the University of Florida, who co-led the work.
“The snake that tried to eat Jennifer Lopez in the movie Anaconda is not as big as the one we found,” he said.
“At its greatest width, the snake would have come up to about your hips,” said David Polly, a geologist at the University of Indiana at Bloomington.
The investigators found the remains of the new species at an unlikely location — at one of the world’s biggest open-cast coalmines, in Cerrejon, Colombia, where giant machines had obligingly gnawed away surface layers of dirt.
Working as huge coal-laden trucks thundered by, the team sifted through the earth, laying bare the remains of supersized snakes and their likely prey — extinct species of crocodiles and giant turtles — and evidence that a massive rainforest once covered the ground.
“The giant Colombian snake is a truly exciting discovery. For years, herpetologists have argued about just how big snakes can get, with debatable estimates of the max somewhere less than 40 feet [12.3m],” said leading snake expert Harry Greene of Cornell University in New York.
Titanoboa cerrejonensis — whose Latin name honors the coal mine — is not only a source of jaw-dropping wonder.
It is also a useful indicator as to the world’s climate after the dinosaurs were wiped out some 65 million years ago, the team said.
Unlike mammals, reptiles cannot regulate their own temperature. They are limited in body size by the ambient temperature of where they live. For example, reptiles today are bigger in the tropics than they are in cooler latitudes.
Based on T. cerrejonensis, the scientists calculate that the mean annual temperature in equatorial South America 60 million years ago would have been 30ºC to 34ºC.
That makes it around 3ºC to 4ºC hotter than tropical rainforests today.
If so, this is a welcome piece of news about climate change.
Simulations about global warming suggest that based on present trends the world’s surface temperatures could rise by between 1.8ºC to 4.0ºC by 2100.
If the supersnakes are a guide, tropical rain forests could still exist at such temperatures, although a fast, massive rise in warming could well be devastating to many species.