Achi news desk-
WASHINGTON –
An ancient giant snake in India may have been longer than a school bus and weighed a ton, researchers reported Thursday.
Fossils found near a mine revealed a snake that stretched about 36 feet (11 meters) to 50 feet (15 meters). It is similar to the largest snake known, about 42 feet (13 meters) that once lived in what is now Colombia.
The largest living snake today is the Asian silent python at 33 feet (10 meters).
The newly discovered behemoth lived 47 million years ago in the swampy evergreen forests of western India. It could have weighed up to 2,200 pounds (1,000 kilograms), researchers said in the journal Scientific Reports.
They named it Vasuki indicus after “the legendary snake king Vasuki, who wraps around the neck of the Hindu deity Shiva,” said Debajit Datta, study co-author at the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee.
This monster snake was not particularly quick to strike.
“Given its large size, Vasuki was a slow ambush predator that would subdue its prey through constriction,” Datta said in an email.
Fragments of the snake’s spine were discovered in 2005 by co-author Sunil Bajpai, based at the same institution, near Kutch, Gujarat, in western India. The researchers compared more than 20 fossil vertebrae to living snake skeletons to estimate size.
Although it is not clear exactly what Vasuki ate, other fossils found nearby reveal that the snake lived in marshy areas alongside sea cats, turtles, crocodiles and primitive whales, which may have been its prey , said Datta.
The other giant snake, Titanoboa, was discovered in Colombia and is estimated to have lived around 60 million years ago.
What these two monster snakes have in common is that they lived during periods of exceptionally warm global climates, said Jason Head, a Cambridge University paleontologist who was not involved in the study.
“These snakes are huge cold-blooded animals,” he said. “A snake needs higher temperatures” to grow to large sizes.
So does that mean global warming will bring back monster-sized snakes?
In principle, it is possible. But the climate is now warming too quickly for snakes to evolve again to become giants, he said.
The Associated Press Health and Science Department is supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
