Titanoboa - largest snake in the history of the world

It grew up to 45 feet long, weighed more than a ton and dined on giant turtles and fearsome crocodiles. It was also the biggest known snake to have ever lived...

Scientists discovered the fossilised backbones of the super-sized snake in a giant open-cast coal mine at Cerrejon in northern Colombia and estimated that at the fattest point on its very long body the snake would have been about three feet wide.

It lived about 60 million years ago, some 5 million years after the demise of the last dinosaurs, and before the warm-blooded mammals had been able to establish themselves as the largest and most widespread animal lifeforms on the planet.

The extinct reptile, formally named Titanoboa cerrejonensis, weighed about 1.25 tons and would have been the top predator in its semi-aquatic habitat of rivers and forests where it would have eaten practically anything that moved, from large tarpon-like fish the size of sharks to extinct crocodiles up to 20 feet long.

Apart from the expected "wow" factor, there is an additional consideration that impacts the debate on global warming:

A general rule for cold-blooded animals is that they get bigger the nearer they live to the equator, and the warmer the ambient temperatures are. Based on this principle, and armed with the knowledge of what is known about snakes today, the researchers were able to estimate the average temperatures of this tropical region 60 million years ago.

The size of Titanoboa indicates that it lived in an environment where the average yearly temperature was between 30C and 34C, which is about 5C hotter than the average temperatures at Cerrejon in Colombia today.

"This temperature estimate is much hotter than modern temperatures in tropical rainforests anywhere in the world... That means that tropical rainforests could exist at temperatures of 3C to 4C hotter than modern tropical rainforests experience," Dr Jaramillo said.

"These data challenge the view that tropical vegetation lives near its climatic optimum, and it has profound implications in understanding the effect of current global warming on tropical plants," he said.

Suggesting that global warming, if it occurs, may not be a threat to current tropical rainforests.