Researchers excavating a coal mine in South America have found the fossilized remains of the mother of all snakes, a nightmarish tropical behemoth as long as a school bus and as heavy as a Volkswagen Beetle.

Modern boas and anacondas, which average less than 20 feet in length and reach a maximum of 30 feet, have been known to swallow Chihuahuas, cats and other small pets, but this prehistoric monster ate giant turtles and primitive crocodiles.

The find sheds new light on snake evolution, but it also provides telling insights into climate. Because Titanoboa cerrejonensis, as it has been named, was coldblooded, the tropical climate had to be six to eight degrees warmer than it is today for a snake that large to survive.

The fossils of several specimens of the snake are from a cache of fossils excavated from the open-pit Cerrejon coal mine in Colombia. Paleontologists are excited about the find because there are few fossils of tropical vertebrates from the 10-million-year period after the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

Most rock outcroppings that might contain fossils have been hidden by the region’s dense foliage, said evolutionary biologist Jason Head of the University of Toronto Mississauga, lead author of a paper on the fossils appearing Thursday in the journal Nature. The coal mining exposed them.

Researchers now believe that the climate got even hotter after this period, perhaps hastening the snake’s ultimate demise. “Big animals went extinct because it simply got too hot,” Conrad said. “This helps us to understand that the effects of global warming aren’t just rising sea levels.”

About Titanoboa

Titanoboa,  meaning “titanic boa”, is a genus of snake that lived approximately 60 to 58 million years ago, in the Paleocene epoch, a 10-million-year period immediately following the dinosaur extinction event. The only known species is the Titanoboa cerrejonensis, the largest snake ever discovered, supplanting the previous record holder, Gigantophis.

By comparing the sizes and shapes of its fossilized vertebrae to those of extant snakes, researchers estimated that the T. cerrejonensis reached a maximum length of 12 to 15 metres (40 to 50 ft), weighed about 1,135 kilograms (2,500 lb), and measured about 1 metre (40 in) in diameter at the thickest part of the body.

Source

Wikipedia