Stunned scientists have found the fossilised remains of the
world's greatest snake -- a record-busting serpent that was as long
as a bus and snacked on crocodiles.
The boa-like behemoth, dubbed Titanoboa, ruled the tropical
rainforests of what is now Colombia some 60 million years ago, at a
time when the world was far hotter than now, they report in a study
.
The size of the snake's vertebrae suggest the beast weighed some
1.135 tonnes, in a range of 730 kilos (1,600 pounds) to 2.03
tonnes.
And it measured 13 metres (42.7 feet) from nose to tail, in a
range of 10.64-15 metres (34.6-48.75 feet), they estimate.
"The discovery of Titanoboa challenges our understanding of past
climates and environments, as well as the biological limitations on
the evolution of giant snakes," said Jason Head, member of the
Panama-based research institute and lead author of the study to be
published in Nature magazine.
"This shows how much more information about the history of Earth
there is to glean from a resource like the reptile fossil record,"
said the assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at
the University of Toronto Mississauga.
From the size of the 1.14-tonne Titanoboa, scientists have
estimated the average annual temperature in the tropical jungle it
inhabited 60 million years ago at 30-34 degrees Celsius (86-93
degrees Farenheit).
"This temperature estimate is much hotter than modern
temperatures in tropical rainforests anywhere in the world," said
Carlos Jaramillo, Smithsonian staff scientist and co-organizer of
the excavations in Colombia.
"That means that tropical rainforests could exist at
temperatures 3-4 degrees Celsius hotter than modern tropical
rainforests experience," he added, alluding to scientific theories
that would have tropical forests disappear if global warming boosts
temperatures by that measure in the future.
Jonathan Block, a vertebrate palaeontologist at the University
of Florida, who co-led the work said "Truly enormous snakes really
spark people's imagination, but reality has exceeded the fantasies
of Hollywood."
"The snake that tried to eat Jennifer Lopez in the movie
'Anaconda' is not as big as the one we found."
"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 investigators found the remains of the new species at an
unlikely location -- at one of the world's biggest open-cast
coalmines, in Cerrejon, Colombia, where giant machines had
obligingly gnawed away surface layers of dirt.
Working as huge coal-laden trucks thundered by, 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 metres), said leading snake expert Harry Greene of
Cornell University, New York.
Titanoboa cerrejonensis -- whose Latin name honours the coal
mine -- is not only a source of jaw-dropping wonder.
It is also a useful indicator as to the world's climate after
the dinosaurs were wiped out some 65 million years ago, the team
say.
Unlike mammals, reptiles cannot regulate their own
temperature.
As a result, they are limited in body size by the ambient
temperature of where they live. For example, reptiles today are
bigger in the tropics than they are in cooler latitudes.
Based on T. cerrejonensis, the scientists calculate that the
mean annual temperature in equatorial South America 60 million
years ago would have been 30-34 degrees Celsius, or 86-93 degrees
Fahrenheit.
That makes it around 3-4 C (5.5-7.2 F) hotter than tropical
rainforests today.
If so, this is a welcome piece of news about climate change.
Simulations about global warming suggest that, on present
trends, the world's surface temperatures could rise by between
1.8-4.0 C (3.2-7.2 F) by 2100.
If the supersnakes are a guide, tropical rain forests could
still exist at such temperatures, although a fast, massive rise in
warming could well be devastating to many species.
The paper is published by the British-based weekly science
journal Nature.
The world's longest snake today is the Asian reticulated python,
specimens of which can grow around 10 metres (32.5 feet), and the
biggest in terms of mass is the green anaconda, with some specimens
weighing 227 kilos (550 pounds).
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