Biggest snake ever discovered in Colombia

This National Geographic video is called Reticulated Python/Anaconda Comparison.

From National Wildlife Magazine in the USA:

Record-Size Snake Nothing to Hiss At

PALEONTOLOGISTS WORKING in Colombia have discovered the fossil remains of a snake so huge it is more like the main attraction of a cheesy horror film than a product of evolution.

Only a dozen or so vertebrae—bones of the spine—have turned up, but they provide enough evidence to show that this creature, an as-yet unnamed relative of boa constrictors, was the largest snake species on record.

Sizing It Up

The really big constrictors of our world rarely exceed 30 feet long. The longest on record was a reticulated python that reached 33 feet. The record weight for a modern snake came from a green anaconda, which tipped the scales at 550 pounds (but was a couple feet shorter than the lither python).

The fossil serpent was built on a different order of magnitude. Jonathan Bloch, the University of Florida, Gainesville, paleontologist who, with colleagues, discovered the bones, estimates that this one would have measured no less than 42 feet long. Its body was probably close to 4 feet in diameter and weighed over 1.25 tons.—Roger Di Silvestro

The fossil snake is from “about 60 million years ago”; so, from the Palaeocene.

See also here. And here.

Fossil snakes from Venezuela: here.

ScienceDaily (Oct. 13, 2009) — Smithsonian researchers working in Colombia’s Cerrejón coal mine have unearthed the first megafossil evidence of a neotropical rainforest. Titanoboa, the world’s biggest snake, lived in this forest 58 million years ago at temperatures 3-5 C warmer than in rainforests today, indicating that rainforests flourished during warm periods: here.

Skeletal remains of a diminutive primate from the Paleocene of Germany: here.

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