The giant serpent is closely related to today’s boas and anacondas, snakes that kill their prey with suffocating coils. Living boas come in various sizes, but their similar proportions gave Head the data he needed to work out how big Titanoboa actually was. The backbones of boas are similar enough that, with help from a computer, you can tell where any individual vertebra sits down the length of the snake by looking at its shape. And you can take an accurate stab at the length of the entire snake based on the size of each vertebra – all members have the same number of segments, and their size is proportional to the animal’s length.

Titanoboa‘s fossilised vertebra showed that it was a whopping 13 metres (42 feet) long. By comparison, the largest verifiable record for a living snake belongs to a 10-metre-long reticulated python, and that was probably a striking exception. Large population surveys of reticulated pythons have failed to find individuals longer than 6 metres. By contrast, Head’s team analysed vertebrae from eight different specimens of Titanoboa and found that all of them were roughly the same size. A length of 13 metres was fairly ordinary for this extraordinary serpent.

Titanoboa was also a hefty creature. Using the length-weight ratios of a rock python and an anaconda as a guide, Head estimated that Titanoboa weighed in at over 1.3 tons. That’s almost thirty times as heavy as the anaconda, the bulkiest species alive today. Its superlative measurements mean that Titanoboa was not only the largest snake in history, but also the largest land-living vertebrate following the demise of the dinosaurs.

It lived some 58-60 million years ago, when the Cerrejon basin was a giant floodplain, criss-crossed by rivers and nestled within a large tropical rainforest. This is exactly the type of habitat that anacondas thrive in today, and it’s likely that Titanoboa shared a similar lifestyle. It may well have been aquatic and hunted similar prey, like crocodiles. Indeed, other fossils from the Cerrejon pit include early relatives of fishes, turtles and crocodiles – all suitable prey for Titanoboa.

The giant snake’s measurements even tell us something about the climate of this ancient world. Snakes are cold-blooded. Their body temperature, and therefore their metabolism, depends on their surroundings, which slaps an upper limit onto the evolution of giants. At any given temperature, a snake can only become so large before its metabolic rate becomes too low to support its bulk. If Titanoboa was bigger than living species, its environment must have been much hotter.

The smaller model on the left belongs to the anaconda, a giant serpent that can grow to 7 metres in length and weigh as much as 45kg.

A fascinating read about the discovery of this monster, its habitat and the creatures that lived with it is detailed in “How Titanoboa, the 40-Foot-Long Snake, Was Found”

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-titanoboa-the-40-foot-long-snake-was-found-115791429/

Very impressive.

Ancient tropical Cerrejón sounds a hellhole though, stinking hot and swarming with titanic snakes.

PermeateFree said:

The giant serpent is closely related to today’s boas and anacondas, snakes that kill their prey with suffocating coils. Living boas come in various sizes, but their similar proportions gave Head the data he needed to work out how big Titanoboa actually was. The backbones of boas are similar enough that, with help from a computer, you can tell where any individual vertebra sits down the length of the snake by looking at its shape. And you can take an accurate stab at the length of the entire snake based on the size of each vertebra – all members have the same number of segments, and their size is proportional to the animal’s length.

Titanoboa‘s fossilised vertebra showed that it was a whopping 13 metres (42 feet) long. By comparison, the largest verifiable record for a living snake belongs to a 10-metre-long reticulated python, and that was probably a striking exception. Large population surveys of reticulated pythons have failed to find individuals longer than 6 metres. By contrast, Head’s team analysed vertebrae from eight different specimens of Titanoboa and found that all of them were roughly the same size. A length of 13 metres was fairly ordinary for this extraordinary serpent.

Titanoboa was also a hefty creature. Using the length-weight ratios of a rock python and an anaconda as a guide, Head estimated that Titanoboa weighed in at over 1.3 tons. That’s almost thirty times as heavy as the anaconda, the bulkiest species alive today. Its superlative measurements mean that Titanoboa was not only the largest snake in history, but also the largest land-living vertebrate following the demise of the dinosaurs.

It lived some 58-60 million years ago, when the Cerrejon basin was a giant floodplain, criss-crossed by rivers and nestled within a large tropical rainforest. This is exactly the type of habitat that anacondas thrive in today, and it’s likely that Titanoboa shared a similar lifestyle. It may well have been aquatic and hunted similar prey, like crocodiles. Indeed, other fossils from the Cerrejon pit include early relatives of fishes, turtles and crocodiles – all suitable prey for Titanoboa.

The giant snake’s measurements even tell us something about the climate of this ancient world. Snakes are cold-blooded. Their body temperature, and therefore their metabolism, depends on their surroundings, which slaps an upper limit onto the evolution of giants. At any given temperature, a snake can only become so large before its metabolic rate becomes too low to support its bulk. If Titanoboa was bigger than living species, its environment must have been much hotter.

The smaller model on the left belongs to the anaconda, a giant serpent that can grow to 7 metres in length and weigh as much as 45kg.

A fascinating read about the discovery of this monster, its habitat and the creatures that lived with it is detailed in “How Titanoboa, the 40-Foot-Long Snake, Was Found”

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-titanoboa-the-40-foot-long-snake-was-found-115791429/

Titanoboa. Sounds familiar. Let’s see.

> the river monsters of the Paleocene Epoch (66 to 56 million years ago). Coal mine. began here by accident 18 years ago (mislabled). fossil jawbone of a land animal The jawbone came from a dyrosaur, a very large crocodile-like creature now extinct (identified in 2003). It was covered with turtle shells.

> During that expedition, in 2004, the researchers grabbed everything they saw, and everything was big: ribs, vertebrae, parts of a pelvis, a shoulder blade, turtle shells more than five feet across. They found bits of dyrosaur and turtle everywhere, and other animals as well, but the team could not sort everything immediately. They put what they could in plastic bags, then dug pits and cast the big pieces in plaster of Paris.

> In 2007, Hastings was inspecting a shipment of fossils labeled “crocodile” and noticed a strange—and very large—vertebra. To his trained eye, it was clearly “not from a croc.” (mislabled again). Eventually the team collected 100 snake vertebrae from 28 different animals.

> The team published its first results in Nature in early 2009, saying Titanoboa was between 42 feet and 49 feet long.

2009, so I may have encountered this snake before. I’m more familiar with the much smaller Australian montypythonoides from Riversleigh.

> Titanoboa’s mouth and whole head could have been over two feet long. Titanoboa had more closely packed teeth than modern-day boas. “Is it more a specialized fish-eater?”

> He noted that an ancient lizard from temperate Australia grew to at least 16.5 feet in length.

Good story.

PermeateFree said:

…

The smaller model on the left belongs to the anaconda, a giant serpent that can grow to 7 metres in length and weigh as much as 45kg.

Given the difference in the size of vertebrae, an estimate of 13 metres total length, a mere twice the length of the anaconda, is seen to be a very conservative estimate. A lower limit on size.

Unless the anaconda model isn’t to scale.

mollwollfumble said:

PermeateFree said:

…

The smaller model on the left belongs to the anaconda, a giant serpent that can grow to 7 metres in length and weigh as much as 45kg.

Given the difference in the size of vertebrae, an estimate of 13 metres total length, a mere twice the length of the anaconda, is seen to be a very conservative estimate. A lower limit on size.

Unless the anaconda model isn’t to scale.

A lot more to it, which is contained in the article.

PermeateFree said:

mollwollfumble said:

PermeateFree said:

…

The smaller model on the left belongs to the anaconda, a giant serpent that can grow to 7 metres in length and weigh as much as 45kg.

Given the difference in the size of vertebrae, an estimate of 13 metres total length, a mere twice the length of the anaconda, is seen to be a very conservative estimate. A lower limit on size.

Unless the anaconda model isn’t to scale.

A lot more to it, which is contained in the article.

Interesting article. Bigger than Montypythonoides riversleighensis, but not by a huge amount.

Michael V said:

PermeateFree said:

mollwollfumble said:

Given the difference in the size of vertebrae, an estimate of 13 metres total length, a mere twice the length of the anaconda, is seen to be a very conservative estimate. A lower limit on size.

Unless the anaconda model isn’t to scale.

A lot more to it, which is contained in the article.

Interesting article. Bigger than Montypythonoides riversleighensis, but not by a huge amount.

Could not discover the length of the above, but below is a life sized model of Titanoboa. As you can see it is not built to climb trees like most pythons and as Montypythonoides riversleighensis is reported to do.

PermeateFree said:

Michael V said:

PermeateFree said:

A lot more to it, which is contained in the article.

Interesting article. Bigger than Montypythonoides riversleighensis, but not by a huge amount.

Could not discover the length of the above, but below is a life sized model of Titanoboa. As you can see it is not built to climb trees like most pythons and as Montypythonoides riversleighensis is reported to do.

Life-sized model of Titanoboa devouring a crocodilian, from the Smithsonian exhibit