World's largest snake discovered in fossilized rainforest

This 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), the scientists wrote in the journal Nature.(Chinese media/Reuters Photo)
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WASHINGTON, Feb. 4 (Chinese media) -- The largest snake the

world has ever known -- as long as a school bus and as heavy as a small car --

ruled tropical ecosystems only six million years after the demise of the

fearsome Tyrannosaurus rex, according to a new discovery to be published on

Thursday in the journal Nature.

Partial skeletons of a new giant, boa

constrictor-like snake named "Titanoboa" found in Colombia by an international

team of scientists and now at the University of Florida (UF) are estimated to be

42 to 45 feet long, said Jonathan Bloch, a UF vertebrate paleontologist who

co-led the expedition with Carlos Jaramillo, a paleobotanist from the

Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama.

Researchers say the extinct snake was even larger

than the wildest dreams of directors of modern horror movies.

"Truly enormous snakes really spark people's

imagination, but reality has exceeded the fantasies of Hollywood," said Bloch,

who is studying the snake at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF

campus. "The snake that tried to eat Jennifer Lopez in the movie 'Anaconda' is

not as big as the one we found."

Jason Head, a paleontologist at the University of

Toronto in Mississauga and the paper's senior author, described it this way:

"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."

Besides tipping the scales at an estimated 1.25 tons,

the snake lived during the Paleocene Epoch, a 10-million-year period immediately

following the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, Bloch said.

The scientists also found many skeletons of giant

turtles and extinct primitive crocodile relatives that likely were eaten by the

snake, he said. "Prior to our work, there had been no fossil vertebrates found

between 65 million and 55 million years ago in tropical South America, leaving

us with a very poor understanding of what life was like in the northern

Neotropics," he said.

"Now we have a window into the time just after the

dinosaurs went extinct and can actually see what the animals replacing them were

like," he noted.

Size does matter because the snake's gigantic

dimensions are a sign that temperatures along the equator were once much hotter.

That is because snakes and other cold-blooded animals are limited in body size

by the ambient temperature of where they live, Bloch said.

"If you look at cold-blooded animals and their

distribution on the planet today, the large ones are in the tropics, where it's

hottest, and they become smaller the farther away they are from the equator," he

said.

Based on the snake's size, the team was able to

calculate that the mean annual temperature at equatorial South America 60

million years ago would have been about 91 degrees Fahrenheit, about 10 degrees

warmer than today, Bloch said.

The presence of outsized snakes and turtles shows

that even 60 million years ago the foundations of the modern Amazonian tropical

ecosystem were in place, he said.