IndiaA group of researchers found fossils of giant ancient snakes that could have been longer than a school bus and weighed a ton.
Scientists in India discovered ancient snake fossils that may be the largest snake species to have ever lived on Earth. This oversized snake can be 15 m long, 2 m more than the size of the current record holder, the Titanoboa python. The newly identified species has a name Vasuki Indicusnamed after the king of snakes in Hinduism, often wrapped around the neck of one of the important gods, Shiva, according to Live Science.
The research team published on April 18 in the journal Scientific Reports suggested that the fossil came from a fully developed adult. A total of 27 fossilized spines from giant snakes were unearthed at the Panandhro Lignite mine in the state of Gujarat. The fossils date back to about 47 million years ago, during the Pleistocene (33.9 to 56 million years ago). They estimated the snake’s total body length using the width of the spine and found that V. indicus could be 11 – 15 m long, although there is likely an error in the estimate.
The researchers used two methods to derive estimates of V. indicus’ body length. Both use modern snakes to determine the relationship between snake spine width and length, but differ in the data sets used. One method uses data from modern snakes in the South American python family (including boas and pythons), the other method uses data on all living pythons. According to study co-author Debajit Datta at the Institute of Technology Indian Roorkee, Vasuki belongs to an extinct family of pythons, distant relatives of pythons and anacondas.
The upper range of the estimate would make V. indicus larger than Titanoboa cerrejonensis, the largest python discovered to date, which lived 60 million years ago and was unearthed in 2002 in northeastern Colombia. V. indicus belongs to the Madtsoiidae group of pythons, first appearing at the end of the Cretaceous period (66 – 100.5 million years ago), in South America, Africa, India, Australia and Southern Europe.
When considering the location of the ribs attached to the spine, the research team speculates that V. indicus has a large, wide, cylindrical body and mainly lives on land. By comparison, aquatic snakes often have elongated, flat bodies. Due to its large size, researchers believe that this python is most likely an ambush predator, taking down prey by constriction, similar to today’s anaconda. According to them, V. indicus grows in a warm climate with an average temperature of about 28 degrees Celsius. However, the research team does not know anything about its muscles, how the python uses its muscles or its food.
Sunil Bajpai, a vertebrate paleontologist at IIT Roorkee, shared that the team hopes to be able to analyze carbon and oxygen in fossils, helping to reveal more about the diet of V. indicus pythons.