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.
At 2,500 pounds, Titanoboa could eat crocodiles. It lived after dinosaurs died out.
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 estimated length, 43 feet, “is the same as the largest Tyrannosaurus rex that we know of, although it only weighs one-sixth as much.
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.
