The Titanoboa, the Largest Snake to Ever Exist

The Titanoboa is an extinct snake. It is the largest snake to ever exist on this planet. It is also the largest reptile to exist since the dinosaurs went extinct. These snakes lived about 60 million years ago. Fossils of them have only been found in one area of the world, La Guajira, Colombia. Their name Titanoboa means Titanic Boa.

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The Titanoboa was like something straight out of a Hollywood horror movie. They were 40 to 50 feet long, weighed around a ton and were three feet wide. Today’s snakes would look like babies in comparison. The largest recorded snake on present day Earth is 29 feet long, a Titanoboa could have easily eaten a snake that size for breakfast. Scientists believe that a snake’s size corresponds directly with how hot or cold of a climate they live in. The hotter the climate the larger the snake, the colder the climate, the smaller the snake. Going with this hypothesis, for the Titanoboa to have grown so large, La Guajira, Colombia must have averaged around 30 degrees Celsius. From what Scientists can tell from fossils, they believe that the Titanoboa looked much like an anaconda, in both appearance and colouration. The anaconda is most likely a descendant of the Titanaboa.

Titanoboas ate everything from prehistoric crocodiles, large tropical fish, large birds, gigantic rodents and turtles with a carapace that measured at least two meters wide. It is believed that they killed their prey by constriction, suffocating and crushing them to death. It is thought that these snakes had such a low metabolic rate that they only needed to eat a couple of times a year.

Fossils of this giant snake were found in 2009 by a team of international scientists, which were led by, Canadian Jason Head. Since the discovery, Scientists have had to rethink their beliefs on how the world was 60 million years ago. They did not think that Earth was so hot during that time, but the existence of such a gigantic snake proves them wrong. They now theorize that a natural greenhouse effect was happening in Colombia at the time that the Titanoboa lived. The existence of the Titanoboa also helped to prove that natural global warning has happened on Earth in the past, but unlike man-made global warming which takes decades, natural global warning happens over millions of years.

The Titanoboa was an amazing animal that lived long before man walked this planet. Its fossils help us to understand a world that we can only begin to imagine. The Titanoboa went extinct due to rapid weather changes that they were not able to withstand. However, their offspring, the anaconda, now hunts the Amazon and although they do not strike the terror the Titanoboa would have, they are still one of the more feared creatures on Earth today.

Sources

• https://www.sites.si.edu/s/topic/0TO36000000L5NmGAK/titanoboa-monster-snake
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanoboa
• https://www.britannica.com/animal/Titanoboa

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