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The tropical rainforest at Cerrejon appears to have thrived at a temperature of 32 degrees Celsius, five degrees warmer than the upper temperature limit for tropical rainforests in modern times. The result was, among other things, the largest snakes the world has ever seen." "It was a rainforest, like today, but it was even hotter and the cold-blooded reptiles were substantially larger. "Tropical ecosystems of South America were surprisingly different 60 million years ago," said Bloch. By comparison, the average yearly temperature of today's Cartagena, a Colombian coastal city, is about 83 degrees Fahrenheit. Head estimated that a snake of Titanoboa's size would have required an average annual temperature of 30 to 34 degrees Celsius (86 to 93 Fahrenheit) to survive. "If we understand these correlations better, we will know more about how climate change affects species, as well as how we can infer things about past climates from species that lived then."

"The anatomy of a species is correlated with its environment on broad scales," Polly said. "As Earth's temperature increases, so does the upper size limit on poikilotherms." "Scientists have long known of a rough correlation between a period or epoch's temperature and the size of its poikilotherms ," said Paul Filmer, program director in the National Science Foundation (NSF)'s Division of Earth Sciences, which co-funded the research. Paleontologist Jason Head of the University of Toronto, the Nature paper's lead author, made an estimate of Earth's temperature 58 to 60 million years ago in an area encompassed by modern-day Colombia. Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute geologist Carlos Jaramillo and University of Florida vertebrate paleontologist Jonathan Bloch discovered the fossils in the Cerrejon Coal Mine in northern Colombia, and investigated what the snake's environment might have been like.

We went a step further and asked, how warm would the Earth have to be to support a body of this size?" "At its greatest width, the snake would have come up to about your hips," said geologist David Polly of Indiana University, who identified the position of the fossil vertebrae, which made an estimate possible. Named Titanoboa cerrejonensis by its discoverers, the size of the snake's vertebrae suggest it weighed 1,140 kilograms (2,500 pounds) and measured 13 meters (42.7 feet) nose to tail tip.Ī paper describing the find appears in this week's issue of the journal Nature. Scientists have recovered fossils from a 60-million-year-old South American snake whose length and weight might make today's anacondas seem like garter snakes. Telephone numbers or other contact information mayīe out of date please see current contact information at media This material is available primarily for archival This artist's rendering of the largest snake on record shows its size it lived in or near water.

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