Warning: Nerd Stuff - Largest prehistoric snake on record discovered in Colombia (Video)

axia777

New member
Oct 10, 2008
2,895
0
0
Scientists have recovered fossils of a 60-million-year-old South American snake whose length and weight might make today's anacondas and reticulated pythons seem a bit cuter and more cuddly.

Named Titanoboa cerrejonensis by its discoverers, the size of the snake's vertebrae suggest it weighed 1140 kg (2,500 pounds) and measured 13 metres (42.7 feet) nose to tail tip. A report describing the find appears in this week's Nature.

Drs Jason Head and David Polly carried out much of the quantitative work behind the discovery whilst working in the School of Biological and Chemical Sciences at Queen Mary, University of London; they identified the position of the fossil vertebrae which made a size estimate possible. Now based at the University of Indiana, Polly explains: "At its greatest width, the snake would have come up to about your hips. 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?"

Crews led by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and the University of Florida's Florida Museum of Natural History discovered the fossils in the Cerrejon Coal Mine in northern Colombia, and together with lead-author Jason Head now of the University of Toronto-Mississauga, used its size to make an estimate of Earth's temperature 58 to 60 million years ago in tropical South America.

Paleontologists have long known of a rough correlation between an age's temperature and the size of its poikilotherms (cold-blooded creatures). Over geological time, as ages get warmer, so does the upper size limit on poikilotherms.

"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 and Dr Jonathan Bloch, Assistant Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at the Florida Museum of Natural History, 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 28°C.

"Tropical ecosystems of South America were surprisingly different 60 million years ago," said Bloch. "It was a rainforest, like today, but it was even hotter and the cold-blooded reptiles were all substantially larger. The result was, among other things, the largest snakes the world has ever seen... and hopefully ever will."

"The temperature estimation shows that a tropical rainforest, like Cerrejon, lived at a temperature of 32°C, five degrees above the upper limit of temperature for tropical rainforest in modern times," said Carlos Jaramillo, a palaeobotanist ad the Smithsonian Topical Research Institute. "These data challenge the view that tropical vegetation lives near its climatic optimum and it has profound implications in understanding the effect of current global warming on tropical plants."

The scientists classify Titanoboa as a boine snake, a type of non-venomous constrictor that includes anacondas and boas. Head and Polly extrapolated the placement of Titanoboa fossil vertebrae by comparing the fossils' structure to the vertebrae of today's boine snakes. Snake vertebrae get bigger near a snake's midsection, but they are also structured differently than vertebrae closer to a snake's head or tail. Using a computer model he wrote, Polly estimated the fossil vertebrae originate near Titanoboa's middle. That means that if Polly's model is incorrect about the bone's placement, the snake could have been even bigger.

Evolution has produced a wide variety of gigantic animals over the last several hundred million years -- dinosaurs, ancient dragonflies, and today's blue whale, to name a few; but why some species lineages produce monsters remains a matter of debate among evolutionary biologists and ecologists.
http://www.physorg.com/news152969011.html

HOLY SHIT!!!! 1140 kg (2,500 pounds) and measured 13 metres (42.7 feet)? Damn! WHo is glad like I am that this snake does not roam the Earth anymore? At 2,500 pounds this guy could eat cows like chickens. This is just amazing stuff. It is also very amazing that the snake only needed an average temp of 30 - 34 degrees C and the average temp now in Columbia is 28. That small of a shift and they went extinct. What a monster. This one is truly for the record books.
 

MisguidedZen

New member
Jan 25, 2009
49
0
0
Hell, I love that the first part of its name is Titanoboa. That's an RPG boss or even a Summon right there. Cool article, thanks for the link.
 

Starnerf

The X makes it sound cool
Jun 26, 2008
986
0
0
Donbett1974 said:
That would make terrifying surprise if you woke with that in your bed.
I imagine being squeezed to death in your sleep by an extinct animal would be rather surprising.
 

Gooble

New member
May 9, 2008
1,158
0
0
That thing would even be kind of tough to kill even with modern weaponry! Weighs about the same as an average car, so you probably couldn't run it over; as thick as a man, so would probably take a tank shell to sever its body; and I don't know much about snake biology, so I don't know whether shooting it would work...
 

Undeadpope

New member
Feb 4, 2009
289
0
0
I wish something as awesomely,amazing creature lived today,or better yet something for man to fear and be conquered by
 

iain62a

New member
Oct 9, 2008
815
0
0
stormcaller said:
iain62a said:
Would Snakes on a Plane have been better if it included this snake?
It would have to be Snake is a Plane though.
That is the coolest mental image ever...

Me flying a giant snake with huge wings and an engine...

I wish I could do half the things in my head in real life...
 

Bulletinmybrain

New member
Jun 22, 2008
3,277
0
0
Gooble said:
That thing would even be kind of tough to kill even with modern weaponry! Weighs about the same as an average car, so you probably couldn't run it over; as thick as a man, so would probably take a tank shell to sever its body; and I don't know much about snake biology, so I don't know whether shooting it would work...
Burn it, cold-blooded so they will easily fry. If you don't want to burn a forest down, just focus light on it and fry it.
 

Bofus Teefus

New member
Jan 29, 2009
1,188
0
0
Sounds like it would make a good level boss that you'd run into about halfway through the game. You can't button-mash this one though, no sir. You've got to dodge it's strike attack, and immediately clobber it with your wagon handle. When you defeat the snake (I almost said "beat") you get a serpentine belt that gives you +2 defense against poison attacks.
 

Starnerf

The X makes it sound cool
Jun 26, 2008
986
0
0
Bofus Teefus said:
Sounds like it would make a good level boss that you'd run into about halfway through the game. You can't button-mash this one though, no sir. You've got to dodge it's strike attack, and immediately clobber it with your wagon handle. When you defeat the snake (I almost said "beat") you get a serpentine belt that gives you +2 defense against poison attacks.
And a +10 to your power steering and alternator recharge.
 

Cahlee

New member
Aug 21, 2008
530
0
0
That is a big snake.. I'm not afraid of snakes but I probably would be if they were all that large..
 

pantsoffdanceoff

New member
Jun 14, 2008
2,751
0
0
That's awesome although i really wanted to see the all the bones assembled together. Can you tell if a snake is was poisonous VIA its fossil?
 

RufusMcLaser

New member
Mar 27, 2008
714
0
0
Undeadpope said:
I wish something as awesomely,amazing creature lived today,or better yet something for man to fear and be conquered by
Well, there's still the colossal squid. [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2910849.stm]
 

Washboard

Dyslexics of the world...UNTIE!
Dec 17, 2008
356
0
0
Heh, Thats nothing...there were guiniepigs the size of rihnos :p
now THATS impressive :) (and cuddly)