Titanoboa Cerrejonensis – fossils of biggest snake ever lived discovered!

Move over, dinosaurs. Paleontologists have discovered ancient fossils of a snake – now named Tinanoboa  Cerrejonensis – which is the biggest snake that ever lived. We are talking about a snake that was longer than 43 feet, and weighed more than a tonne. That’s more weight than a car, and longer than some buses.

Compare vertebrae! A fossil of the Titanoboa Cerrejonensis dwarfs a vertebra of an anaconda

The announcement is to be made on Thursday by the international scientific team about Titanoboa Cerrejonensis, a huge snake whose fossils were found in the Cerrejen coal mines of Colombia. Titanoboa was a constrictor like today’s boas and anacondas, and dined on crocodiles and giant turtles about 60m years ago in what were then a steamy tropical rainforest.

Picture: Artist's impression of the Titanoboa Cerrejonensis behemoth snake in its natural habitat, among other huge creatures

“It’s the biggest snake the world has ever known,” said Jason Head, a paleontologist at the University of Toronto Mississauga and part of an international team who discovered and identified the fossilised snake bones. He added, “The snake’s body was so wide that if it were moving down the hall and decided to come into my office to eat me, it would literally have to squeeze through the door.”

Nice description, that. Good there are no more Titanoboas around, moving through hallways, looking to eat us.

Paleontologists compared around a dozen vertebrae, which are ten centimetres long, with the length of existing snakes to estimate the beast must have reached 42ft (13m). The ten centimetre vertebrae were about twice the width of the largest taken from a 19.5ft (6m) modern-day anaconda.

The Titanoboa Cerrejonensis survived in temperatures of 35 degree Celsius and is the longest snake known till date. Previously, the largest known snake  was Gigantophis, which lived about 39 million years ago in Egypt and  was at least 33 feet long.”Tropical ecosystems of South America were surprisingly different 60 million years ago,” said Jonathan Bloch, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Florida, Florida Museum of Natural History, who worked with Head on the snake study. “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.”

As reptiles do not control their own body heat like mammals, their size is often dependent on the heat. Hence, snakes found in the hot tropics are usually bigger than the ones found in colder climes. Using this information, the team calculated that the Titanoboa Cerrejonensis lived at a time when the weather was 34-35 degree Celsius. An interesting related bit of info that has emerged is that tropical rainforests could exist at those temperatures, and that means even with global warming, forests won’t die out easily.

So far, have found about 180 fossils of backbone and ribs that came from about two dozen individual Titanoboa Cerrejonensis snakes. No fossils of the skull have been found yet.

Today, the longest living snake is the reticulated python which reportedly grows up to a length of 32 feet.

The anaconda is bulkier, though it is shorter than the reticulated python at a reported maximum length of 25 feet.

The Titanoboa Cerrejonensis rules over them all in sheer size and heft.