About 58 million decades back, a gigantic giant snake slithered from the swampy jungles and forests of South America and it started its reign of terror, it had been the colossal Titanoboa.
The Titanoboa which means literally”titanic boa” is an extinct genus of snakes that lived throughout the Paleocene epoch, roughly 60 to 58 million decades back.
This is a span of 10 million decades immediately after the dinosaur extinction event. Together with these critters that fast diversified stayed and took up the bulk of those ecosystem niches left empty.
In 2009, the fossils of 28 human Titanoboa cerrejonensis were located in Colombia, at the Cerrejón Formation from the coal mines of Cerrejón at La Guajira. There the scientists found fossilized plants and leaves and a few reptiles such as turtles that were giant, and also the crocodiles at the background of records.
Some scientists believe the Titanoboa was the conclusion of this decade and that it is among the very significant since the Tyrannosaurus rex findings from 1902.
It’s the only known species from the genus and is the largest, longest, and heaviest snake discovered since it supplanted the Gigantophis the prior record-holder in 33 ft. It weighed over 1000 pounds and quantified 14 m or about 50 ft in length. Their girth measured over 3 feet (1 m) in the thickest aspect of the human body, the center.
Titanoboa size
The colossal snake would consume a crocodile, but surprisingly only a couple decades back, scientists did not have a hint that it existed. The Titanoboa is very similar to the snakes featured at the Hollywood terror snake films, it is a fantastic thing.
With no competition of these dinosaurs, this snake has been the greatest predator on the planet Earth for approximately 10 million decades. Thought to be the ancestor of anacondas and the boa constrictor, the Titanoboa was not a venomous snake, but rather a constrictor snake that is big.
Like many contemporary snake species, they have been specialist ambush predators, capable of striking at an amazing rate at unsuspecting prey. It was effective at beating its
Unfortunate victims with all the constricting power of 400 pounds per square inch.
Using its Gigantic dimensions, the Titanoboa
Likely spent the majority of its time in the water, similar to the green anacondas found today from the Amazon forest.
But the discovery of this Titanoboa fossils suits not only our fascination and curiosity to find out more about the creatures that once inhabited our planet. We are also given clues, among other matters about climate fluctuations that happened on our planet by the records.
By way of instance, it’s likely the Titanoboa and other reptiles grew bigger about 60 million years ago due to a much warmer climate. This contrasts with all the gigantism seen in other creatures and dinosaurs also, which is likely as a result of oxygen gain in the atmosphere.
Because snakes are ectothermic creatures, they are not able to control their temperature and rely on external warmth to endure. Its discovery suggests the tropics, the Titanoboa habitat, have to have been considerably warmer, previously than formerly considered.
The Earth’s warmer weather throughout the Paleocene epoch enabled these cold-blooded snakes to achieve much larger sizes compared to that of contemporary snakes.
Together with the warmer weather and the lack of giant predators such as the Theropod dinosaurs, snakes possess the capability to exploit this chance and really massive species such as the Titanoboa began to evolve.
Now the biggest ectothermic species are located from the tropics, where the weather is warmer, and the smallest is located further from the equator area. Not all scientists agree with this concept.
But climate change likely also played an significant part in the extinction of this Titanoboa. The concept is that temperatures that are decreasing imposed dimensions that are smaller for the development of kinds of snakes and reptiles to take its own place.
Habitat shift is just another option to explain the extinction of this Titanoboa.
But it is likely that its temporal and geographical ranges were bigger than what we understand today, but this has to be verified by additional fossil discoveries.
A life-sized Titanoboa replica was on display in the Smithsonian Natural History Museum at Washington and started a nationwide tour in 2013.
It amazes me that something as enormous as the colossal Titanoboa was not discovered earlier by scientists. It required Gigantophis to be displaced by science since the snake that lived on Earth in the spotlight.
However, who knows what lies under the earth, perhaps scientists find fossils of bigger snakes which roamed the world millions of years back.
