Super serpent: An illustration of how the snake would have looked in life, with a crocodile for scale.
Credit: Jason Bourque
PARIS: Stunned scientists have found the fossilised 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 the U.K. journal Nature today.
13 metres
The size of the snake's vertebrae suggest the beast weighed around a tonne, and measured 13 metres from nose to tail.
"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.
"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.
Limited by temperature
"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 [12 metres]," said leading snake expert Harry Greene of Cornell University, New York.
Titanoboa cerrejonensis – whose Latin name honours the coal mine – is not only a source of jaw-dropping wonder. It is also a useful indicator of the world's climate after the dinosaurs were wiped out some 65 million years ago, the team say.
Unlike mammals, reptiles cannot regulate their own temperature. As a result, 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.
