Titanoboa

Titanoboa cerrejonensis was the largest known snake.^[1][2]It is the second largest known snake after a new largest snake remains are found named Vasuki Indicus.

Titanoboa Temporal range: Palaeocene
Scientific classification
Kingdom:	Animalia
Class:	Sauropsida
Order:	Squamata
Suborder:	Serpentes
Family:	Boidae
Subfamily:	Boinae
Genus:	Titanoboa Head, 2009

Now extinct, the snake was a relative of the anaconda and the boa constrictor. It was about 43 feet long (13 m), and weighed over a ton (about 1135 kg or 2,500 pounds). The snake lived in the Palaeocene epoch, about 58 million years ago.^[3][4] It ate crocodiles.

The fossil was found in an open-cast coal mine in Colombia, in 2009. Plant fossils at the site proved the climate at the time was a tropical rainforest. The site was in the Cerrejón Formation in La Guajira, Colombia. Other large reptile fossils have been found at this site.^[1][3][5]

Researchers found three skulls of the snake in 2002. A life-size replica is on view at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C. It was sent on a world tour to be shown at various museums.^[6]

Habitat

Titanoboa lived in the first recorded tropical forest in South America. It shared the ecosystem with large Crocodylomorpha and large turtles. The paleogeography of the late Paleocene was a sheltered paralic (coastal) swamp, with an open connection to the proto-Caribbean in the north. In this environment tropical aquatic ferns like Salvinia flourished. The ferns were found as fossils in the Bogotá Formation and the Palermo Formation.^[7]

Related pages

• Gigantophis