Fossil Remains Show Snake Was 42 Feet Long

Titanoboa, an ancient snake that lived in the rainforest of Columbia nearly 60 million years ago was once 42 feet long - the length of a bus. The snake weighing more than a ton, greatly outweighs any snake on our Earth toady with Anaconda's reaching only 550lbs.

The snake remains were discovered by a team of researches led by Jason Head from University of Toronto at Mississauga in Canada.

"We think it was a completely aquatic snake, that it didn't really go out on land except to bask every once in a while," Head told LiveScience. "And aquatic snakes generally eat aquatic vertebrates, and the only other aquatic vertebrates around are these primitive crocodiles and these giant turtles. And you can imagine it's probably pretty difficult to eat a turtle when you can't chew."

The fossilized remains were flown to the University of Florida for analysis by Jonathon Bloch, an expert in prehistoric vertebrates. "I just about screamed. It was about as wide as a man's hand. The vertebra of a 17ft-long anaconda is only slightly more than an inch wide'.

"Tropical ecosystems of South America were surprisingly different 60 million years ago," Bloch said. "It was a rainforest, like today, but it was even hotter and the cold-blooded reptiles were all substantially larger."

"Truly enormous snakes really spark people's imagination, but reality has exceeded the fantasies of Hollywood," Block noted. "The snake that tried to eat Jennifer Lopez in the movie Anaconda is not as big as the one we found."