Excavations in Colombia co-organized by Carlos Jaramillo, staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama and Jonathan Bloch, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the University of Florida's Florida Museum of Natural History, unearthed fossil remains of a new snake species named Titanoboa cerrejonensis.
Surrounded by huge trucks extracting coal from Cerrejon, one of the world's largest open-pit mines, researchers discovered fossilized bones of super-sized snakes and their prey, crocodiles and turtles, in the Cerrejon Formation, along with fossilized plant material from the oldest known rainforest in the Americas, which flourished at the site 58-60 million years ago.
Jason Head, the lead author of the new species description in the journal Nature, is a research associate at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History and assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Toronto Mississauga. Head, with David Polly, associate professor of geosciences at Indiana University, used the ratio between vertebral size and the length of existing snakes to estimate that this boa-like snake must have reached 13 meters (42 feet) in length and weighed more than a ton. Titanoboa, as it is now called, is the largest snake ever known, and was the largest non-marine vertebrate from the epoch immediately following the extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
What in the world was a snake THAT large eating in the paleocene of SoAm?
6 comments:
"What in the world was a snake THAT large eating in the paleocene of SoAm?"
Anything it wanted?
ha. ha.
A bit more seriously, that thing was meant to eat large animals.
Um. What?
Okay, okay. In all seriousness, now...
Is it necessarily megafauna we're after here? If food is plentiful enough, lots of medium-sized animals would certainly suffice for ectotherms like large snakes.
Mammals and crocs are pretty good candidates, but I don't know specifically of any croc taxa that would have been available from that place and period.
I wonder, in fact, if there's a much larger risk involved with eating really large animals. Not killing them--some of the footage captured of large modern snakes makes me think it's much easier to kill an animal than eat it in the fashion of snakes. If the prey is too large, splitting the GI tract actually becomes a risk.
'Course, not of this actually rules out big meals. It just makes me think that maybe big meals aren't necessarily the only conclusion to go to.
There was a study done on terrestrial carnivores. IIRC, it found that those that were greater than 45 kg mainly ate animals larger than themselves. Those smaller than that mass, much smaller. I wonder if it was meant strictly for carnivora, but...if not...
Maybe it had just been fasting since the Cretaceous...
Here's what Head and co. say in the paper:
"Remains of Titanoboa were found in depositional environments consisting of coastal plains incised by large-scale river systems within a wet tropical rainforest and were associated with an aquatic vertebrate fauna including podocnemidid pleurodire turtles, dyrosaurid mesoeucrocodylians, and elopomorph and dipnoan fishes. Similarities between depositional environments of the Cerrejón Formation and habitats of extant Eunectes together with inferred prey taxa (crocodyliforms) indicate a similar ecology of Titanoboa to modern anacondas."
Incidentally I wasn't aware that there were freshwater dyrosaurids...learn something everyday.
If more of the Carnivora ate like snakes (no chewing and no slicing), I'd say that would have much applicability.
However, snakes are weird. So long as food availability isn't really an issue, snakes will continue to grow, regardless of the size of their dinners.
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