The largest snakes alive today – anacondas, pythons, and boa constrictors – are pretty hefty creatures. You may have seen videos of these snakes eating prey that seems much too large for them, such as deer, pigs, caimans, and large birds.
But even today’s biggest snakes, such as the 20-foot, 500-lb green anaconda, would be tiny compared to the largest snake species ever known to have existed. Amidst the fossils discovered at the Cerrejón coal mine in northern Colombia in 2007, researchers gradually realized that they were looking at partial skeletons of a huge snake from 60 million years ago that looked like a giant boa constrictor but lived in water like an anaconda.
Known as “Titanoboa,” the snake species is estimated to have been up to 45 feet long and weighed over a ton – the largest known predator following the extinction of the dinosaurs. To put that into perspective, that’s around the weight of a small car and approximately the length of a school bus. It would struggle to fit through a doorway – if doorways had existed in the Paleocene Epoch.
So why did the Titanoboa get so big, and could a snake ever reach such an astonishing size again? It has to do with temperature, which is reflected in today’s cold-blooded animals. The largest live near the equator, where it is the hottest, since their body temperature and metabolism rely on their ambient environment. However, some 60 million years ago, South America was significantly hotter, with an average annual temperature of around 91 degrees F (33 degrees C). That’s around 10 degrees F (5.5 degrees C) hotter than average temperatures in that region today.
The wild world of the Titanoboa:
- There is some debate about the Titanoboa's diet, with some paleontologists theorizing that it lived on giant turtles and crocodile-like reptiles, while others say that its skull indicates a fish-focused diet.
- The Cerrejón coal mine, where Titanoboa cerrjonensis fossils were discovered, preserves the oldest evidence of a South American rainforest.
- Theoretically, we could one day see larger snakes than today’s anacondas, pythons, and boas if the planet continues to warm. However, this is unlikely to occur due to significant tropical habitat loss, interactions with humans, and the rapid rate of global warming outpacing the evolution of snakes.