Researchers speculate that Titanoboa sustained a similar diet and may have fed on the giant turtles and crocodiles whose skeletons were also found in Cerrejón. Their strength and size enables them to take down formidable prey including wild pigs, capybara and jaguars. Without venom, these snakes incapacitate their prey by squeezing them to death and then swallowing them hole. At 30 feet and 550 pounds, the green anaconda is the largest species of snake alive today. The opening in the jungle created by the coal mine has created a window into that time period and the creatures that lived then.īloch suggests that Titanoboa was similar to modern day green anacondas, giant-sized boas that live in the swamps and rivers of the Amazon and Orionoco basins in South America. “In the tropics we know nothing about that 10 million years,” says Bloch. Scientists are especially interested in obtaining information about the first 10 million years following the demise of the dinosaurs. To collect fossils, researchers need dry areas with exposed rock-requirements nearly impossible to satisfy in a region covered by dense jungles. “The tropics are a horrible place to find fossils because they are completely overgrown,” Bloch explains. “Now we have a window into the time just after the dinosaurs went extinct and can actually see what the animals replacing them were like,” he explains.Ĭerrejón, the world’s largest open-pit coalmine, provides an unprecedented opportunity for paleontological research. According to Bloch, these excavations have yielded the first fossil vertebrates ever found in tropical South America from the Paleocene Epoch 65 to 55 million years ago. The massive anaconda-like snake lived 6 million years after the dinosaurs went extinct.ĭuring a series of excavations at the Cerrejón coal mine in northern Colombia, an international team of scientists-led by Jonathan Bloch and Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute Staff Scientist Carlos Jaramillo-collected the remains of Titanoboa along with fossils of the giant-sized relatives of modern-day crocodiles and side-necked turtles. “This was the largest predator on the planet for at least 10 or 20 million years,” says Jonathan Bloch Associate Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at the University of Florida’s Museum of Natural History.
That is how researchers describe the 2,500 pound, 45-foot long Titanoboa cerrejonensis-the biggest snake the world has ever known-who ruled the tropics 65 million years ago.
IMAGINE A SNAKE so wide it would barely fit through a doorway and so tall it would reach an adult’s waistline.
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