Image: Extinct giant snake
 Jason Bourque
The extinct giant snake (shown in an artist's reconstruction) would have sent even Hollywood's anacondas slithering away.
updated 2/4/2009 11:42:47 AM ET 2009-02-04T16:42:47

A colossal snake about the length of a school bus slithered about South America's rainforests some 60 million years ago, according to an analysis of the skeletal remains of what is now considered the largest snake ever identified.

"It's the biggest snake the world has ever known," said Jason Head, a paleontologist at the University of Toronto Mississauga and part of an international team who discovered and identified the snake bones.


Fossils of the extinct snake species, now called Titanoboa cerrejonensis, were discovered in the Cerrejon Coal Mine in northern Colombia.

From the fossilized vertebrae, the researchers conservatively estimate the snake weighed about 2,500 pounds and measured nearly 43 feet nose to tail tip.

Image: Snake bones
Ray Carson  /  Ray Carson/UF News Bureau
Top: series of vertebrae and ribs of 45 foot Titanoboa. Middle: series of vertebrae with one rib extending below. Bottom: two vertebrae (white), and a partial skull & mandible of modern 17 foot Anaconda, for scale.

The giant reptile was a boine snake, a type of non-venomous constrictor that includes anacondas and boas. In the same fossil rainforest, the researchers also found giant sea turtles and crocodile relatives.

In fact, while alive, the snake likely gorged on its crocodilian neighbors.

"We think it was a completely aquatic snake, that it didn't really go out on land except to bask every once in a while," Head told LiveScience.

"And aquatic snakes generally eat aquatic vertebrates, and the only other aquatic vertebrates around are these primitive crocodiles and these giant turtles. And you can imagine it's probably pretty difficult to eat a turtle when you can't chew."

Ray Carson  /  Ray Carson/UF News Bureau
Left: a vertebra (one bone of the spine) of a 17 foot modern Anaconda; Right: a vertebra of 45 foot Titanoboa.
The snake's enormous dimensions are a sign that temperatures along the equator where the remains were found were once much balmier.

"The bigger you get, the more energy you need overall," Head said. "And since they get their energy from external environments, the bigger they are, the more energy they're going to require from the external environment."

(Snakes are cold-blooded animals, so they don't generate their own body heat.)

The researchers calculated that in order to support the slithering giant, its tropical habitat would have needed a temperature of about 86 to 93 degrees Fahrenheit (30 to 34 degrees Celsius).

"Tropical ecosystems of South America were surprisingly different 60 million years ago," said Jonathan Bloch, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Florida, Florida Museum of Natural History, who worked with Head on the snake study.


The discovery is detailed in the Feb. 5 issue of the journal Nature.

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