An artistic rendering of a madtsoiid snake. The new snake found in India belongs to the madtsoiidae … [+]
Nix Illustration
Researchers in India have discovered an absolute beast of a serpent. Snakes make you nervous? You might want to hide in your Land Rover.
The creature, which lived around 47 million years ago, measured between 36 and 50 feet long, according to paleontologists Debajit Datta and Sunil Bajpai, authors of a new study on the find published in the journal Scientific Reports on Thursday. That makes it longer than a Tyrannosaurus rex. Forget Snakes on a Plane. This is more like Snakes One-Fifth the Length of a Plane.
The creature belonged to the madtsoiidae clade, an extinct family of terrestrial snakes that existed for around 100 million years and thrived during a geological era when average temperatures hovered around an estimated 82 degrees. Madtsoiidae slithered around a broad geographical area that encompasses what is now South America, Africa, Australia, Southern Europe and India. The snake found in India is not only the biggest madtsoiid yet observed, but one of the biggest snakes that’s ever lived, according to the study.
The researchers call the new species Vasuki Indicus. Vasuki is the name of the mythical snake king seen coiled around the neck of the Hindu deity Shiva, and Indicus refers to India, where Vasuki was found in a coal mine in Gujarat, a state along the west coast.
Bajpai, an earth sciences professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, and Datta, a postdoctoral fellow, identified the species from a partial vertebral column that includes 27 vertebrae. Most vertebrae were well-preserved, with a few positioned as they would have been many millions of years ago when the snakes still roamed Earth.
The exceptionally large vertebrae measure between about 1.5 inches and 2.5 inches long and between around 2.5 inches wide and 4.7 inches wide, suggesting a broad cylindrical body. The backbone appears to come from a fully grown reptile. The snake would have had at least 800 vertebrae in all, the pair said in an email.
Vasuki indicus’ vertebrae viewed from different angles. Paleontologists were able to study 27 of … [+]
Sunil Bajpai and Debajit Datta
Bajpai and his former students uncovered the fossils in 2005 while prospecting the area for early whales, which they found, along with other vertebrate fossils. At first, the team thought the remains that turned out to be Vasuki belonged to a crocodile.
Years later, in 2023, Bajpai and Datta began a formal study of the fossils. When they determined they had a snake on their hands, “its unusually large size was the first thing that surprised us,” the pair said in a joint email.
The scientists speculate their snake was a slow-moving ambush predator that would have subdued its prey through constriction, similar to an anaconda or python. They say Vasuki helps tell the story of how madtsoiidae moved across the Earth over time. They believe Vasuki originated in the Indian subcontinent and spread via southern Europe to Africa around 56 to 34 million years ago.
“We inferred that Vasuki belonged to a snake lineage that evolved in India at a time when it was an isolated, island continent during the Late Cretaceous and Paleocene times,” the researchers said. “The large size of Vasuki also suggests that the tropics were comparatively warmer than at present. This is because of an already established correlation between increase in ambient temperature and body size of poikilotherms,” or organisms with variable body temperatures.
Titanboa, You’ve Got Competition
Vasuki’s size and shape rivals that of another giant extinct snake, Titanoboa, which lived in tropical South America 60 million years ago and grew to an average of 45 feet.
Snake expert Bryan Fry, a professor with the School of the Environment at Australia’s University of Queensland, cites the newly identified snake as an example of convergent evolution. That process sees two distantly related organisms independently evolving similar traits or behaviors to adapt to nature’s necessities—in this case filling a similar aquatic ambush feeding niche.
The identification of the Indian snake “underscores the fundamental biological principle that when there is an available niche, there is a positive selection pressure for the evolution of a similar morphotype,” Fry, who was not involved with the study, said in an interview. “As such, this is a fascinating and quite important discovery.”
Earlier this year, a team led by Fry announced that it had uncovered a new species of anaconda, the northern green anaconda, in the Amazon. It’s been quite a year for massive snakes so far, and we’re not even at the halfway point.
