Ancient fossil find: This snake could eat a cow!

Ancient fossil find: This snake could eat a cow!

www.newsweek.com

(NEW YORK) Never mind the 40-foot snake that menaced Jennifer Lopez in the 1997 movie "Anaconda." Not even Hollywood could match a new discovery from the ancient world.

Fossils from northeastern Colombia reveal the biggest snake ever discovered: a behemoth that stretched 42 to 45 feet long, reaching more than 2,500 pounds.

(visit the link for the full news article)

Maybe this was the type of snake that convinced Eve to eat from the Tree of life... This is the type of stuff legends are made of... interesting story to say the least. I love this part: "A human would just be toast immediately."

www.newsweek.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

I remember an episode of Arthur C Clarkes Mysterious World which had a Belgium pilot describe how a giant snake reared up and attacked his helicopter. Pictures of the snake show it quite clearly.

www.youtube.com...

Perhaps it's a distant relation?

Actually, the beast probably munched on ancient relatives of crocodiles in its rainforest home some 58 million to 60 million years ago, he said.

Holy moly, wouldn't I love to be a fly on the wall to see THAT fight go down!!

Intriguingly, and somewhat off-topic, the article goes on to say...

Titanoboa's size gives clues about its environment. A snake's size is related to how warm its environment is. The fossils suggest equatorial temperatures in its day were significantly warmer than they are now, during a time when the world as a whole was warmer.

Anthropogenic Global Warming - what a sham!

reply to post by Mintwithahole.


Thats an intruiging account-its a shame the pic doesn't have anything to give it perspective but great find

Found this other footage of a rather large snake - don't know what happened to the cameraman though

In the link below Popsci also had a page about this. There is a comment at the bottom of the page that I found of great information. See the quotes below.

www.popsci.com...

Oakspar77777, 02/04/09 at 2:18 pm

Consider as well the snake's tendency to a poorly normalized size distribution. Most humans, for example, are similar in size (within the same population). Snakes, however, will often vary greatly. While this is uniform in dwarfing due to a lack of sustinance (smaller Eastern Diamond backs on coastal islands with limited prey-bases), it is not in the abundance of food (two corn snakes raised in captivity on the same diet can vary from three to six feet in maxium length).
Since they only found a very limited sample, we cannot know if that 43' monster was (a) an abberation of size (like a 6' corn snake) of a normally smaller species OR (b) a normal member of a species capable of signifigantly exceeding the size of the fossils found.
Science may have found a monster here, or it is possible that the real monsters were even greater in size.
J-lo is still safe, however, as any snake that big is going to be a slow ambush predetor (like big snakes today), not a clever hunter.
Also, on the temperatures needed, I wonder if he took into account gigantothermy as a reducer of heat requirements in larger cold-blooded animals. Also, species specific tollerances can exceed the general bulk to temperature ratios of cold blooded animals (the Canadian Garter Snake, for example).
19 out of 21 people found this comment helpful

Another Fact from the popsci page:

"At its greatest width, the snake would have come up to about your hips,"

[edit on 4-2-2009 by JbT]

They've already got snakes out there big enough to eat a cow.

But that fossil is huge and that snake would have been unreal looking. Glad they got rid of that model.