Almost 60 million years ago, northeastern Colombia was dominated by the presence of what is believed to be the largest snake to have ever populated the Earth. The discovery of a 13-meter long fossil in South America not only offers a hint on the impressive size of the animals living back then, but it also sheds light on the characteristics of the past tropical climate.
This is especially important for researchers who have been trying to obtain a model of the Paleocene climates, supporting the idea that the temperature difference between the tropics and higher-latitude regions was similar to the one we see today.
The discovery of a snake is of particular importance since snakes need a certain environmental context to survive, namely 30 to 34 degree Celsius temperatures. Today, the largest living snakes populate the tropical regions in South America and Asia.
The scientists who’ve uncovered the giant snake in an open-pit coal mine at Cerrejón have estimated it to have been 12.8 meters long, and to have weighed 1,135 kilograms, based on the largest preserved vertebrae found at the scene. Furthermore, they named the species Titanoboa cerrejonensis, as it is believed to have been closely related to the boa constrictor, which is a non-venomous species of snake living in South and Central America. It rarely exceeds 4 meters in length.
Even today, it is hard to find a snake that exceeds 6 – 6.5 meters long, scientists explained. However, some adult pythons are known to reach almost 10 meters in length (such as the Python reticulatus native to Southeast Asia). The Anacondas, the largest snakes populating South America, rarely exceed 7 meters in length, even though there have been reports of even larger ones, although never proven.
Snakes are known to grow to such impressive sizes thanks to the favorable environment (warm temperatures) in the tropical regions. This is why scientists estimated the Paleocene snake to be the largest, or one of the largest, snakes on Earth. The snake’s evolution to 13 meters suggests Paleocene temperatures of at least 30 to 34 degrees Celsius, which support the idea of high concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide at the time.
However, this discovery also raises a lot of questions on how much warmer the temperatures must have been at the time, and how the humidity and higher temperatures managed to cope with each other. It has been estimated that the temperatures at the time were approximately 6 degrees Celsius higher than what we see today in the tropics.
But, the link between the size and the temperature environment continues to be rejected by some scientists. However, that doesn’t discourage Jason Head from the University of Toronto, Canada, lead author of the study, from trying to understand the extent to which the evolution of such giant snakes is limited by the climate.
