Size does matter because the snake's gigantic dimensions are a sign that temperatures along the equator were once much hotter. "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."
"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. The scientists also found many skeletons of giant turtles and extinct primitive crocodile relatives that likely were eaten by the snake, he said. 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."īesides 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.
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"The snake that tried to eat Jennifer Lopez in the movie 'Anaconda' is not as big as the one we found." "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. Researchers say the extinct snake was even larger than the wildest dreams of directors of modern horror movies. doi: 10.1016/j.geobios.2014.03.004.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 are estimated to be 42 to 45 feet long, the length of the T-Rex "Sue" displayed at Chicago's Field Museum, 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. "First report of the giant snake Gigantophis (Madtsoiidae) from the Paleocene of Pakistan: Paleobiogeographic implications". Marivaux, Laurent Merle, Didier Solangi, Sarfraz H. ^ Rage, Jean-Claude Métais, Grégoire Bartolini, Annachiara Brohi, Imdad A."II.-Preliminary Note on some Recently Discovered Extinct Vertebrates from Egypt. "The osteology of the giant snake Gigantophis garstini from the upper Eocene of North Africa and its bearing on the phylogenetic relationships and biogeography of Madtsoiidae" (PDF). "They might be giants: morphometric methods for reconstructing body size in the world's largest snakes". "Titanic ancient snake was as long as Tyrannosaurus". Gigantophis garstini is classified as a member of the extinct family Madtsoiidae. In 2013, vertebrae collected in Pakistan were found to be similar to Gigantophis vertebrae collected in Egypt, but their exact affinities are uncertain. Its discovery was published in 1901 by paleontologist Charles William Andrews, who described it, estimated its length to be about 30 feet, and named it garstini in honor of Sir William Garstin, KCMG, the Under Secretary of State for Public Works in Egypt. The species is known only from a small number of fossils, mostly vertebrae. Later estimates, based on allometric equations scaled from the articular processes of tail vertebrae referred to Gigantophis garstini, revised the length of Gigantophis garstini to 6.9 ± 0.3 metres (22.64 ± 0.98 ft). If 10.7 m (35.1 ft), it would have been more than 10% longer than its largest living relatives. Jason Head, of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, has compared fossil Gigantophis garstini vertebrae to those of the largest modern snakes, and concluded that the extinct snake could grow from 9.3 to 10.7 m (30.5 to 35.1 ft) in length. It lived about 40 million years ago during the Eocene epoch of the Paleogene Period, in the Paratethys Sea, within the northern Sahara, where Egypt and Algeria are now located.ĭescription Size A diagram showing the estimated lengths of Gigantophis garstini compared to other large snakes. Before the Paleocene constrictor genus Titanoboa was described from Colombia in 2009, Gigantophis garstini was regarded as the largest snake ever recorded. Gigantophis is an extinct genus represented by its sole member Gigantophis garstini, a giant snake.
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