“Snakes,” swashbuckling archeologist Indiana Jones famously groans in Raiders of the Misplaced Ark. “Why’d it need to be snakes?”
If, like Indy, the mere considered a serpent makes you shiver, you’re not alone — a concern of snakes is among the many most typical phobias, even for individuals who have by no means seen one in individual. Actually, people could have developed to be born with an innate concern of snakes and spiders, in accordance with a research printed in Frontiers in Psychology in 2017.
However even for those who might sidestep a garter snake with out batting a watch, you may really feel in a different way for those who discovered your self face-to-face with the Titanoboa cerrejonensis. Learn on to study extra about this menacing creature and different big prehistoric snakes.
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Prehistoric Snakes
Spanning properly over 40 toes from tip to tail, this colossal serpent — longer than a college bus and almost as heavy as a transport container — is regarded as a distant relative of boa constrictors and anacondas. Slithering by means of the swampy jungle that after stretched throughout present-day Colombia, Titanoboa was a fearsome predator.
It didn’t strike with sharp fangs or lethal venom, however as a substitute squeezed the life out of its prey, primarily crushing them to demise. Fortunately, its heyday was roughly 60 million years in the past, just some million years after the closing days of the dinosaurs.
Titanoboa wasn’t the one primeval serpent that after wriggled its method throughout the planet. Whereas fossil information for these often-fragile creatures stay incomplete, scientists have discovered a lot about them in current many years. This is extra on Titanoboa and two prehistoric snakes that, fortuitously, you’ll by no means have to fulfill.
1. The Largest Snake Ever — Titanoboa cerrejonensis
A life-size duplicate of Titanoboa on show on the Smithsonian’s Nationwide Museum of Pure Historical past. The snake’s sheer dimension suggests it had no bother devouring animals as massive as alligators. (Credit score: James DiLoreto/Smithsonian)
The most important snake that ever slithered was T. cerrejonensis. Scientists first uncovered fossils from Titanoboa in 2009 after they discovered fossilized vertebrae and ribs belonging to twenty-eight particular person snakes in an open-pit coal mine in northern Colombia.
It was the construction of the vertebrae that led the workforce to consider it was associated to the boa constrictor, prompting them to dub the species T. cerrejonesis, or “titanic boa from Cerrejón” for the coal mine wherein it was discovered. In the meantime, the dimensions of the vertebrae steered that the prehistoric monster weighed a whopping 2,500 kilos and measured 42 toes in size, in accordance with the workforce’s evaluation in Nature.
The researchers additionally explored what the snake’s setting may need regarded like. They calculated {that a} snake of Titanoboa’s stature would have wanted a mean annual temperature of 86 to 93 levels Fahrenheit to assist its metabolism. This means that as temperatures enhance, so does the dimensions restrict that cold-blooded creatures are able to reaching.
2. The Largest Sea Snake — Palaeophis colossaeus
Fossilized vertebrae belonging to Palaeophis colossaeus. (Credit score: Ghedo/Wikimedia Commons)
Palaeophis colossaeus is the biggest sea snake to ever have existed. This aquatic snake as soon as glided by means of the waters of the traditional Trans-Saharan Seaway, a shallow saltwater area that stuffed Africa’s Sahara Desert round 50 to 100 million years in the past. Estimated to span greater than 30 toes, fossil information point out that Palaeophis colossaeus, the largest sea snakes to ever stay, swam alongside colossal catfish, spiny, mollusk-crushing fishes and gigantic, long-snouted crocodilians. On account of its sheer dimension, it might have consumed smaller species of whales with ease.
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P. colossaeus — in addition to different big aquatic serpents that belonged to the Palaeophis (“historic snake”) genus — stays poorly understood by scientists, as just a few fossils have been discovered within the now-landlocked nation of Mali.
However researchers proceed to unravel the enigmatic sea snake’s mysteries. In an evaluation printed within the Swiss Journal of Paleontology in 2021, scientists used micro CT-scanning methods to create 3D fashions of the snake’s vertebrae, which confirmed it was extra strong and large than different aquatic snakes of the period.
3. The Former Reigning Champ — Gigantophis garstini
This diagram exhibits the estimated lengths of Gigantophis garstini in comparison with different massive snakes like Titanoboa. (Credit score: Gamma 124/Wikimedia Commons)
Since its discovery in Algeria over 100 years in the past, Gigantophis garstini was generally known as the biggest snake to have ever lived — till Titanoboa snatched that title in 2009. Nonetheless, at greater than 33 toes lengthy and weighing round half a ton, this python-like predator was no slouch when it got here to consuming its prey.
As this prehistoric snake slithered by means of the woodlands of northern Africa and southern Asia in the course of the Eocene Epoch (roughly 40 to 35 million years in the past), paleontologists assume that it might have stalked mammalian megafauna just like the Moeritherium, pig-like creatures that may evolve into at present’s elephants.
For greater than a century, G. garstini was the one identified species of its now-extinct genus, Gigantophis, or “big snake” in historic Greek. However that every one modified in 2014, when researchers discovered a second (incomplete) fossil specimen, distinct from Gigantophis garstini, in Pakistan, suggesting that different species of titanic snakes are nonetheless on the market, ready to be discovered.
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