Fossil hunters discover largest snakes ever to have slithered on earth
For anyone with even the slightest phobia about snakes, it might be best to look away now.Fossil hunters working in an open-pit coal mine in Colombia have unearthed the remains of several giant prehistoric snakes, thought to be the largest ever to have slithered on earth.The boa constrictor-like beasts, aptly named Titanoboas, weighed more than one and a quarter tonnes and measured at least 13m long from nose to tip. At their widest, the snakes would have come up to the waist of an adult human.The partial skeletons of eight individuals were uncovered at the site, alongside the fossilised remains of what may have once have been the creatures' dinner: a 2m-long giant turtle and an ancient ancestor of the modern crocodile.The skeletons were discovered when Carlos Jaramillo, a paleobotanist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, was invited to Cerrojon in northern Colombia, home to one of...
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