Sixty million years ago, the world's biggest snake slithered around northern South America. STRI staff scientist Carlos Jaramillo and Jonathan Bloch, from Florida Museum of Natural History, unearthed fossil remains of a new snake species named Titanoboa cerrejonensis in Cerrejón, Colombia, one of the world's largest open-pit mines.
John Head, lead author of the paper “Giant boid snake from the Paleocene Neotropics reveals hotter past equatorial temperatures” and colleagues including Jaramillo and Bloch, described the species in Nature (February 5) after the discovery of the remains of the super-sized snake and their prey, crocodiles and turtles, along with fossilized plant material from the oldest known rainforest in America, which flourished at the site 58-60 million years ago. The researchers used the ratio between vertebral size and the length of existing snakes to estimate that this boa-like snake that must have reached 13 meters (42 feet) in length and weighed more than a ton. Titanoboa is the largest snake ever known, and was the largest non-marine vertebrate from the epoch immediately following the extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
Titanoboa's size indicates that it lived in an environment where the average yearly temperature was 30-34 degrees Celsius. This estimate coincides with paleoclimatic models predicting greenhouse conditions."This temperature estimate is much hotter than modern temperatures in tropical rainforests anywhere in the world. The fossil floras that the Smithsonian has been collecting in Cerrejón for many years indicate that the area was a tropical rainforest. That means that tropical rainforests could exist at temperatures 3-4 degrees Celsius hotter than modern tropical rainforests experience," said Jaramillo.
John Head, lead author of the paper “Giant boid snake from the Paleocene Neotropics reveals hotter past equatorial temperatures” and colleagues including Jaramillo and Bloch, described the species in Nature (February 5) after the discovery of the remains of the super-sized snake and their prey, crocodiles and turtles, along with fossilized plant material from the oldest known rainforest in America, which flourished at the site 58-60 million years ago. The researchers used the ratio between vertebral size and the length of existing snakes to estimate that this boa-like snake that must have reached 13 meters (42 feet) in length and weighed more than a ton. Titanoboa is the largest snake ever known, and was the largest non-marine vertebrate from the epoch immediately following the extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
Titanoboa's size indicates that it lived in an environment where the average yearly temperature was 30-34 degrees Celsius. This estimate coincides with paleoclimatic models predicting greenhouse conditions."This temperature estimate is much hotter than modern temperatures in tropical rainforests anywhere in the world. The fossil floras that the Smithsonian has been collecting in Cerrejón for many years indicate that the area was a tropical rainforest. That means that tropical rainforests could exist at temperatures 3-4 degrees Celsius hotter than modern tropical rainforests experience," said Jaramillo.
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