Titanoboa, the largest snake that ever lived
A thirteen-metre, tonne-heavy constrictor rules the Colombian swamps ten million years after the dinosaurs.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 2 million years
- Known to
- ± 1 million years
- Era
- Paleocene, Cenozoic
Titanoboa cerrejonensis reaches around thirteen metres and perhaps 1,100 kilograms, far beyond any living snake. Its vertebrae were first used as a palaeothermometer: since snakes are ectotherms, and body size in ectotherms scales with ambient temperature, its bulk was taken as evidence for a mean tropical temperature of 30 to 34 degrees. That inference has since been challenged on the grounds that the scaling relationship is weak. The animal itself is not in doubt, and it shows how completely the reptilian top-predator role could be refilled once the mammals were still small.