World's largest snake snacked on crocodiles
Scientists have discovered the remains of the world's biggest snake which was over 13 metres long and weighed more than 1,140 kilograms.
The experts say the monster Boa named Titanoboa was so huge and fearsome it makes modern anacondas and pythons look cuddly by comparison.
Living in the swamps of South America 60 million years ago Titanoboa would have spent much of its time in the water and snacked on alligators and crocodiles.
The fossil hunters - who made the discovery in orthern Colombia - say that the monster was so huge if it slithered past you it would be as high as your waist.
The Titanoboa cerrejonensis fossil vertebra is placed alongside the vertebra of a modern day, 10-foot-long boa constrictor. The two vertebrae are both positioned near the snakes' bellies.
"At its greatest width, the snake would have come up to about your hips," said Indiana University Bloomington geologist David Polly.
"The size is pretty amazing. But our team went a step further and asked, how warm would the Earth have to be to support a body of this size?"
"There are many ways the anatomy of a species is correlated with its environment on broad scales," Polly said.
"If we understand these correlations better, we will know more about how climate and climate change affect species, as well as how we can infer things about past climates from the morphology of the species that lived back then."
Assuming the Earth today is not particularly unusual, Head estimated a snake of Titanoboa's size would have required an average annual temperature of 30 to 34 C (86 to 93 F) to survive. By comparison, the average yearly temperature of today's Cartagena, a Colombian coastal city, is about 83 F.
Photos by: Jason Bourque, University of Florida
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