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 assume, after unearthing its stays from a strip mine in India.
Vasuki indicus is called 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 might have been 15 meters lengthy.
But it nonetheless might 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 examine into Vasuki indicus, which was printed 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 greatest instance they discovered was 11cm extensive.
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 dimension are correct, it is going to 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 stated. “It could nicely have been a mild large, resting its head on a excessive porch shaped by coiling its large physique for a lot of the day or shifting sluggishly via the swamp like an limitless practice. In some methods, it jogs my memory of Kaa from The Jungle Book.“
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