The Earth is home for tons of animals, out of them is snake.
The image of snake has many different cultural and religious meanings.
Snakes have been widely revered in many cultures,
such as in ancient Greece where the serpent was seen as a healer.
Asclepius carried a serpent wound around his wand,
a symbol seen today on many ambulances.
In Judaism, the snake of brass is also a symbol of healing,
of one's life being saved from imminent death.
In Christianity and Judaism,
the snake makes its infamous appearance in the first book of the Bible
when a serpent appears before Adam and Eve
and tempts them with the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge.
In Neo-Paganism and Wicca,
the snake is seen as a symbol of wisdom and knowledge.
Snakes are among the most feared animals on the planet.
There are over 3,000 different species,
from the four-inch Barbados threadsnake to the 30-foot anaconda.
These legless, scaly vertebrates, found in almost every biome,
can slither, swim, and even fly.
Some snakes are born with two heads, while others can reproduce without males.
Their unique qualities make them some of the weirdest animals
to be found anywhere in the world.
However, in this video, I will tell you about an ancient giant snake – Titanoboa,
the biggest snake ever.
Several million years after the extinction of the Dinosaurs,
Earth appeared a new life is the snake Titanoboa.
Titanoboa is an extinct genus of very large snakes
that lived in what is now La Guajira in northeastern Colombia.
They could grow up to 12.8 m (42 ft) long and reach a weight of 1,135 kg (2,500 lb).
Fossils of Titanoboa have been found in the Cerrejón Formation,
and date to around 58 to 60 million years ago.
The giant snake lived during the Middle to Late Paleocene epoch
along with tortoises and prehistoric crocodiles.
Titanoboa looks like a Boa snake, hunting like Crocodile.
The only known species is Titanoboa cerrejonensis,
the largest snake ever discovered,
which supplanted the previous record holder, Gigantophis.
Etymology
The name Titanoboa means "titanic boa".
The species epithet cerrejonensis refers to the Cerrejón coal mine and the Cerrejón Formation,
in which the fossils have been found.
Description
By comparing the sizes and shapes of its fossilized vertebrae to those of extant snakes,
researchers estimated that the largest individuals of T. cerrejonensis found
had a total length around 12.8 m (42 ft)
and weighed about 1,135 kg (2,500 lb; 1.12 long tons; 1.25 short tons).
Is the size of titanoboa really huge?
Titanoboa is twice as long and five times as big as the giant Anaconda that lives now.
The largest giant Anaconda was found to be about 8.43 meters from head to tail
and weighs about 227 kg.
While large, Titanoboa is just as big as shrimp when compared to the largest Dinosaurs.
Some of the plant-eating dinosaurs that preceded it weighed a hundred times larger than Titanoboa.
The largest snake is just like a small shrimp when compared with Titanosaurus
which has a length of up to 26 meters and weighs about 59.3 tons.
Naming and discovery
In 2009, the fossils of 28 individuals of T. cerrejonensis were found in the Cerrejón Formation
of the coal mines of Cerrejón in La Guajira, Colombia.
Before this discovery, few fossils of Paleocene-epoch vertebrates
had been found in ancient tropical environments of South America.
The snake was discovered on an expedition by a team of international scientists led
by Jonathan Bloch,
a University of Florida vertebrate paleontologist, and Carlos Jaramillo,
a paleobotanist from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama.
The name Titanoboa means "titanic boa".
The species epithet cerrejonensis refers to the Cerrejón coal mine
and the Cerrejón Formation,
in which the fossils have been found.
Habitat
Titanoboa inhabited the first recorded tropical forest in South America.
It shared its ecosystem with large Crocodylomorpha and large turtles.
The paleogeography of the Late Paleocene was a sheltered paralic (coastal) swamp area,
sheltered by the emerging later Guajira hills in the west
and the slowly rising present-day Serranía del Perijá in the east,
with an open connection to the proto-Caribbean in the north.
In this environment the tropical aquatic ferns of the genus Salvinia flourished,
as evidenced by fossils found in Cerrejón,
the Bogotá Formation and the Palermo Formation.
Why is titanoboa so huge?
Scientists have two different opinions about the environment temperature
in the age of the snake monster.
Now let's come to the first opinion.
The size of T. cerrejonensis has also provided clues as to the earth's climate during its existence;
because snakes are ectothermic, the discovery implies that the tropics, the creature's habitat,
must have been warmer than previously thought, averaging about 32 °C (90 °F).
The warmer climate of the Earth during the time of T. cerrejonensis
allowed cold-blooded snakes to attain much larger sizes than modern snakes.
Today, larger ectothermic animals are found in the tropics, where it is hottest,
and smaller ones are found farther from the equator.
Other researchers disagree with the above climate estimate.
For example, a 2009 study in the journal Nature
applying the mathematical model used in the above study
to an ancient lizard fossil from temperate Australia predicts
that lizards currently living in tropical areas should be capable of reaching 10 to 14 m (33 to 46 ft),
which is not the case.
In another critique published in the same journal,
Mark Denny, a specialist in biomechanics, noted that the snake was so large
and was producing so much metabolic heat
that the ambient temperature must have been four to six degrees cooler
than the current estimate,
or the snake would have overheated.
Hunting
You may assume from its name that "titanic boa" hunts like modern Boa snakes.
Indeed, it looked quite a bit like a modern-day anaconda,
it most likely didn’t hunt like one.
While Anaconda slips the body around its prey and wraps it tightly until its victim is choked.
Actually Titanoboa attacked its prey in a more dramatic way,
it sneaked up on its prey and with one quick strike,
bit them in the jugular.
However, like a boa, it was capable of constricting on its prey when necessary,
although it wasn’t its first option.
Another fact about this reptile is that it was a carnivore
which preyed on a variety of different animals.
It could have eaten a variety of smaller reptiles and birds,
and may even have hunted crocodiles!
It certainly would have been big enough to hunt them.
The titanoboa's breakfast was probably 2 crocodiles,
though it was not venomous at all,
but instead it would crush the life of it's prey with a massive force of constriction per square centimet.
That's like being squished by three Eiffel towers!
Titanoboa though according to science was most vulnerable when it was digesting it's meal,
but it has a secret weapon when the animal in the titanoboa is being digested
it can spit out the animal and fight back, and get another meal.
Unlike most constricting snakes titanoboa would first bite its prey,
so whenever the prey would move the teeth would go in deeper.
The Hunt For A Skull
One particular find, however, was unlikely.
Though they might uncover more vertebrae,
it would take a skull to show them what the enormous serpent was really capable of
and fossilized snake skulls are notoriously difficult to find.
The problem is that snake jaws are made powerful by their muscles, not their bones
their skulls are actually remarkably fragile
and usually crumble before sediment can build over them.
As a result, they don’t usually make it into the fossil record.
But remarkably, over the next few years,
the team uncovered the remains of 28 enormous serpents
and not one but three skull fragments,
allowing them to piece together a full-scale replica of a snake so large and so frightening
that it left no doubt about its place in the new jungles of the world.
Even among the massive creatures of the ancient rainforest,
Titanoboa was king: it was the apex predator of its era,
a creature as unquestionably the ruler of its environment as the Tyrannosaurus Rex
was in its own time.
Its astonishing dominance has led some to wonder
what would have happened if Titanoboa hadn’t gone extinct?
Titanoboa became famous
On 22 March 2012, a full-scale-model replica of a 14.6 m (48 ft), 1,135 kg (2,500 lb) Titanoboa
was displayed in Grand Central Terminal in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, New York.
It was a promotion for a TV show on the Smithsonian Channel called Titanoboa
Monster Snake which aired on 1 April 2012.
That's the end of my clip.
Thanks for watching, see you again.