Imagine a snake longer than a delivery container — longer than a T-Rex — slithering via a swamp, looking crocodiles.
It’s the most important snake that ever lived, researchers suppose, after unearthing its stays from a strip mine in India.
Vasuki indicus is known as after the Hindu snake god that Shiva wore as a necklace. Based on 27 vertebrae paleontologists dug up from the lignite mine that turned the beast’s tomb, estimates maintain that it may have been 15 meters lengthy.
Del Eocene medio la Vasuki indicus tiene una longitud corporal estimada de entre 11 y 15 metros esto lo haría la serpiente más grande el mundo!, de lo qué sabemos de la serpiente extinta son 27 vértebras https://t.co/SL5BjYssBC pic.twitter.com/YLd121IRq1
— Scar king(Ferrus) (@Destroyer397) April 19, 2024
But it nonetheless may have snuck up on you.
“Considering its large size, Vasuki was a slow-moving ambush predator that would subdue its prey through constriction like anacondas and pythons. This snake lived in a marshy swamp near the coast at a time when global temperatures were higher than today,” Debajit Datta, a paleontologist on the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, advised Reuters.
A one-ton snake
Datta led the research into Vasuki indicus, which was revealed this week within the journal Scientific Reports. On the low finish, Vasuki would have been about 11 meters lengthy and weighed a metric ton. The researchers had no alternative however to base these figures on vertebrae — the animal’s solely stays. The largest instance they discovered was 11cm large.
Vasuki was a part of the Madtsoiidae snake household, a long-lived reptile group that appeared some 90 million years in the past and went extinct about 12,000 years in the past. If estimates of its measurement are correct, it’ll edge out the present largest-ever snake — the Cenozoic Titanoboa, at 13 meters lengthy.
Vasuki’s world was scorching, in comparison with right this moment’s. Global floor temperature now hovers round 15 levels C, however the Middle Eocene interval noticed that common soar to twenty-eight levels. It additionally thrived whereas the supercontinent Gondwana was within the strategy of rending aside, laying the muse for the world map we all know right this moment.
“Vasuki was a majestic animal,” Datta mentioned. “It could properly have been a mild big, resting its head on a excessive porch shaped by coiling its large physique for many of the day or transferring sluggishly via the swamp like an infinite practice. In some methods, it jogs my memory of Kaa from The Jungle Book.“