It was the mother of all snakes, a nightmarish behemoth as long as a school bus and as heavy as a Volkswagen Beetle that ruled the ancient Amazonian rain forest for 2 million years before slithering into nonexistence.
Now this monster, which weighed in at 2,500 pounds, has resurfaced in fossils taken from an open-pit coal mine in Colombia, a startling example of growth gone wild.
Modern boas and anacondas, which average less than 20 feet in length and reach a maximum of 30 feet, have been known to swallow Chihuahuas, cats and other small pets, but this prehistoric monster snacked on giant turtles and primitive crocodiles.
"This is amazing. It challenges everything we know about how big a snake can be," said herpetologist Jack Conrad of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, who was not involved in the research.
The snake's estimated length, 43 feet, "is the same as the largest Tyrannosaurus rex that we know of, although it only weighs one-sixth as much," he said.
The find not only sheds new light on snake evolution; it also provides telling insights on climate. The snake flourished about 58 million to 60 million years ago. Because Titanoboa cerrejonensis, as it has been named, was coldblooded, the tropical climate had to be 6 to 8 degrees warmer than it is today for a snake that large to survive, said evolutionary biologist Jason Head of the University of Toronto at Mississauga, lead author of a paper on the fossils appearing today in the journal Nature.
The remains of several specimens of the snake are from a cache of fossils excavated from El Cerrejon coal mine in northern Colombia. Paleontologists are excited about the find because there are few fossils of tropical vertebrates from the period after the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
Most rock outcroppings that might contain fossils have been hidden by the region's dense foliage, said paleontologist Jonathan Bloch of the University of Florida, who identified the snake.
"The entire 10-million-year period following the extinction of the dinosaurs is a blank slate," he said.
Bloch and his students identified hundreds of specimens that had been dug from the mine, including "the largest freshwater turtle ever known" and "beautifully preserved skeletons" of an extinct species of crocodile "known to have been in South America, but never seen [there] before."
