Bus-sized serpent fossil slithers into record books

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(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-02-05 09:41

PARIS -- Scientists have announced the discovery of the fossilized remains of the world's greatest snake -- a record-busting serpent that snacked on crocodiles and was as long as a bus.

The boa-like behemoth is said to have ruled the tropical rainforests of what is now Colombia about 60 million years ago, at a time when the world was far warmer than it is now, the scientists reported in a study released yesterday.

An artist's rendering shows the colossal prehistoric snake Titanoboa cerrejonensis, whose remains were found in a Colombian coal mine. This monster was the largest snake ever known to have lived. Titanoboa was at least 43 feet (13 meters) long and weighed 2,500 pounds (1,140 kg), scientists wrote in the journal Nature. [Agencies]

The size of the snake's vertebrae suggests the beast weighed about 1.135 tons, in a range of 730 kg to 2.03 tons.

It measured 13 m from nose to tail, in a range of 10-15 m.

"Truly enormous snakes really spark people's imagination, but reality has exceeded the fantasies of Hollywood," said Jonathan Block, a vertebrate paleontologist 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 paper on the giant serpent was published by the British-based weekly science journal Nature.

The investigators found the remains of the new species at an unlikely location - in one of the world's largest open-cast coalmines in Cerrejon, Colombia, where giant machines had obligingly gnawed away surface layers of dirt.

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.

"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 40 feet (12.3 m)," said leading snake expert Harry Greene of Cornell University, New York.

The world's longest snake today is the Asian reticulated python, specimens of which can grow about 10 m, and the biggest in terms of mass is the green anaconda, with some specimens weighing 227 kg.