Largest Prehistoric Snake On Record Discovered In Colombia 70
minimen writes "Scientists have recovered fossils of a 60-million-year-old South American snake. Named Titanoboa cerrejonensis by its discoverers, the size of the snake's vertebrae suggest it weighed 1140 kg (2,500 pounds) and measured 13 meters (42.7 feet) nose to tail tip. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the longest snake ever measured was 10 meters (33 feet) in length. The heaviest snake, a python, weighed 183 kilograms (403 pounds)."
Slashdotted, (Score:3, Interesting)
Badger badger badger (Score:3, Interesting)
A snaaaaake! A snaaaaake!
Seriously, it's scary when real-life produces a more terrifying monster than Hollywood. This creature could have devoured elephants, and likely considered their actual diet (giant crocodiles) a light snack.
I guess it's the same with Jaws and other Hollywood classics, though. Megalodons were capable of fitting five upright adult humans between its jaws, the sharks of Hollywood could barely manage a leg.
The largest eagles that could fly had 15'-17' wingspans - Hitchcock's Birds were nothing in comparison.
And Indricotherium transsouralicum, at twenty tonnes, was definitely nastier than many of the beasties in Jurassic Park.
Is it that the real-life counterparts to the horrors of scriptwriter imagination are too far beyond human comprehension? Too far beyond budget constraints? Or too big to fit on the cinema screens?
Re:Cumulative estimation error (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, the BBC's article reports that they found bones from twelve snakes, so it's a fair assumption that they found quite a number of bones and therefore have a good idea of what part of the snake they are from.
Estimating the size does assume that you've some idea of how bones scale, but there are plenty of examples of modern snakes that range from the very small to the very large, so there should be a fair amount of data on this. The key question on this is whether they measured multiple data points or just one or two. If they measured a large number of data points and they all scale by the amounts predicted if modern vertebrae are a good indicator, then it's safe to say that modern vertebrae are indeed a good indicator, and that the resulting size is probably correct.
The temperature is slightly easier. Anything cold-blooded has to rely on external heat sources to survive. The surface area will tell you how quickly heat can be absorbed, but also how quickly heat will be lost. If a snake drops below a critical temperature, it ceases to be active. Even colder, it cannot digest food and can even rot. The ambient temperature must have been high enough for the snake to thrive in the warmer months and at least endure when it got cold.
However, there will be margins of error for all of these calculations. There is also no ceiling on the margin of error for temperature (these snakes can't have been larger than the maximum size that could survive, but could always be smaller by any amount). The maximum size of this species, under the conditions of the time, are therefore unknown, and certainly can't be assumed to be remotely close to the maximum size of the species overall.
In fact, given that the giant crocodiles of about that time were around 40' long and that these snakes probably ate such crocodiles, it would not be at all unreasonable to guess that these were juveniles rather than full-grown. This would also go a long way to explaining why there were so many in one spot. Snakes are not known for being social animals.
If we assume these were indeed juveniles, full-grown snakes of this species might easily have been in the 60-80' range. Of course, if we could just find the nearest living relative and back out all the modern genetic patches, we could find out.
Or not scary enough (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, if you consider that:
- A T-Rex by modern estimates can be as low as 5m/s (11 mph) and by other estimates a sprint of over 10m/s would produce fatal forces in its bones. It only had to chase down animals his own size, which also waddled slowly.
- the Indricotherium Transsouralicum that you mention was basically an overly massive giraffe. Ok, technically a rhino which had evolved to fill the same niche as a giraffe. It was a herbivore which ate leaves off trees. Also you probably could outrun him too.
- you'd probably be as impractical a prey for a Megalodon as it would be for a normal shark to hunt sardines. Marine animals which feed on stuff as disproportionately small compared to their own size, do so by filtering them out of the water (see the whale, for example), not by chasing them individually and chewing them to bits. So for a Megalodon you'd probably not even register as an interesting prey. It fed on similarly overgrown things.
A lot of the things nature produced just aren't as scary as you seem think. A movie about a battleship-sized shark that completely ignores the hero, or about a T-Rex that can be outrun even at a jogging or marathon pace, well, just wouldn't be much of a horror. A herd of small fast velociraptors is actually scarier by far.