The remains of a 2,500 pound, 43 feet long prehistoric snake have been found in Colombia. It is believed to be the largest kind of snake to live on earth.
To give you a comparison, the largest snakes on earth today are a little under 20 feet.
How warm would the earth have to be to support a snake that size?
Based on the snake’s size, the team was able to calculate that the mean annual temperature in equatorial South America 60 million years ago would have been about 91 degrees Fahrenheit, about 10 degrees warmer than today, Bloch said.
“Tropical ecosystems of South America were surprisingly different 60 million years ago,” said Bloch. “It was a rainforest, like today, but it was even hotter and the cold-blooded reptiles were all substantially larger.
“The result was, among other things, the largest snakes the world has ever seen…and hopefully ever will.”
Indeed. Honestly, I’m a bit glad they’re not around anymore. They would eat us for appetizers.
(The snake in the picture is just a regular snake, not a prehistoric one.)
Fight global warming or a 43 foot long snake will kill you.
That needs to be on billboards.
I like that, Ty. Fear tactics always work!
I’m sorry to be the annoying guy that does this, but let’s all come together for a quick geography lesson.
* ColOmbia is the country at the very tip of South America.
* ColUmbia is a place in USA (or a lot of places, according to wikipedia).
Not the same place.
With that done, i’m glad there’s good mentions of this country in the news for a change, they usually focus on the drugs thing ignoring the rest. Also they discovered many species of frogs a few days ago too, including a translucent one.
Have you pictured it? a translucent frog! you can see it’s organs! it’d be interesting to have a few of those around (unless it’s poisonous, i think we have the most poisonous frog in the world, i don’t want one of those close even if it looks cool).
I also agree that we must use the Giant Snakes Argument to fight global warming:
“Did you saw Anaconda?”
“Yeah”
“Well, that one was bigger, and apparently ate a steady diet of crocodiles. What were you saying about global warming?”
*shocked expression and pale face*
Yeah, i like that tactic ;)
@Jaime: Thanks for the correction, it’s been fixed. I type “Colombia” so rarely that it automatically comes out with a “u.” :)
There’s an artists rendition in the article. I always wonder how they pick the color of these things. Like with the dinosaurs. I supposed they picked that greenish-gray alligator color for dinosaurs because they are related, but maybe dinosaurs were actually colorful, like parrots.
Isn’t there some evidence that many of them were quite colorful?
This is very dim memory, so I am prepared to be wrong…
Holy shit…
This is a really cool finding, but HOLY CRAP that is huge.
*walks away stunned*
FWIW, I googled it and it seems no one knows what color dinosaurs were. There is a guess that because dinosuars are related to birds and birds can see color, that dinosaurs could see color and therefore they were colorful for reproductive (attracting a mate) purposes. There is one find of some sort of preserved feather from a feathered dinosaur and it was black and white striped.
Looks like they where very colourful although this is just an artists impression.
http://wagonmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/dinogallery_page_6.jpg
If anyone is still interested in dinosaur colors and the fossil feather, check here:
What color was that dinosaur?
I thought there was a dinosaur fossil found not too long ago with some preserved skin? Did I imagine it, or am I just remembering it wrong?
Snakes!!? Why’d it have to be snakes?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7I4QgTnRRw8
I read about this. Sooooooooooooo interesting.
I want to find things like this when I grow up :P
Digital Dame-
You are correct about the dino skin, but it was petrified, so no color, just texture.
One thing I want to know is:
Why were they so much larger back then, or rather, why are they so much smaller now?
I’d love to know, it’s been bugging me for a while.
Zach, I think one current hypothesis for the cause of the large size of many animals “back in the day” was two-fold: 1) Earth was a lot warmer and 2) there was more oxygen in the atmosphere. Warmer climate = less energy expended staying warm = more energy available for growth. Similar process with more oxygen–animals use oxygen to break down glucose and get energy from it, so more oxygen means more energy, essentially. Although I think the oxygen thing would have had more of an effect on insects (e.g., giant dragonflies and cockroaches), since they “breathe” through their skin–the more oxygen that was in the atmosphere, the more easily it could diffuse into their tissues. Most insects etc today are size-limited because they can’t get enough oxygen to their cells if they’re too big.
This is just what I remember from paleontology/historical geology courses, though. It could be that there is a whole different hypothesis out there now.
Jaime:
Froggie!
zachattackgo:
Increasing the size reduces the ratio of surface area to volume. Given that snakes are ectothermic, changing this ratio changes their ability to gain or shed heat; larger snakes would have comparatively less surface area with which to exchange heat with the environment, and the snake’s core would be more insulated, taking longer to adjust to changes in temperature.
I don’t know exactly how this means that maximum snake size rises with temperature, but it makes sense that it could be.
Kate:
As I understand it (and I might be wrong), there wasn’t significantly more oxygen in the atmosphere 60mya, when this snake was alive. In the Devonian (about 400mya), when you see the giant insects, the oxygen levels were so high that mammals would have had serious problems with oxygen toxicity.
Whoa! It’s kinda unnerving coming from Pharyngula to your post.
Hmm, I’d love to have seen Noah’s ark with two of these slithering around….
You’re right, wintermute–I misread the article. Got my Paleocene and Devonia mixed up :)
Snakes…why’d it have to be snakes?
The level of oxygen doesn’t neccesarily relate to the size of an animal, when speaking of insects and athropods there is a direct coralation between size and the level of oxygen,(basically all insects and athropods,spiders and the like, have box lungs,which are very primative breathing ‘tubes’ thus limiting their size in relation to the oxygen available and their ability to actually get that into and through their bodies.), wheras most other terestrial animals are not so limited, as there sizes usually have little to no corralation to the amount of oxygen available, their sizes seem to be limeted by other factors. Granted not all of these factors are known,but oxygen is not one of them, consider that after the permian extinction the oxygen level duruing the following ages(triassic,jurrasic,and cretaceous) was not as high as earlier, in fact during probably half of the age of dino’s the level was LESS than it is today. Therefore it would be reasonable to surmise that in the 5-10 million years following the cretaceaous extinction event the oxygen was less than it was during the preciding ages(scince there is a strong corelation between drops in the amount of oxgen directly following extinction events,be they meteors or volcanoes that start the ball rolling).
I would even sugest that less oxygen would spur growth in reptiles and mammals considering that large bodies tend to have large muscles which would aid in breathing, not to mention aid in out competing their rivals, now it has been mentioned that the temperature has much to do with size when considering cold blooded animals…I find it wierd that the artical on this massive snake is the first I have seen /read on that as a limiting factor for reptiles and although it makes some ‘intuitive sense’ , there are several accounts of extremely large reptiles in the last several hundred years that make me question that… if just a little bit.
Now as to color I would suspect at least in the case of this snake it would closely resemble the green anaconda…if just because of likely similar life style and habitats.and the fact that the aforementioned snake is the largest extant species of boid living today..and having much the same actual habitats.