New Species May Be The Largest Snake To Have Ever Lived

A brand new species of prehistoric snake could also be one of many largest snakes to have ever slithered the Earth. With an estimated physique size of as much as 15 meters (over 49 ft), the extinct species may even rival the scale of Titanoboa, the present title holder of the world’s largest-ever snake. 

The newly found snake, a member of the extinct Madtsoiidae snake household, lived within the Indian subcontinent round 47 million years in the past. It has been named Vasuki indicus as a homage to a Hindu legendary snake, known as Vasuki, and the nation of its discovery, India – Indicus is the Latin phrase for Indian.

Researchers on the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee just lately found its fossilized stays at a coal mine within the state of Gujarat, western India. In their new research, they describe 27 largely well-preserved vertebrae from the snake, measuring between 37.5 and 62.7 millimeters (roughly 1.5 and a couple of.5 inches) in size. 

Based on the scale of the bones, they estimated that the species might have reached between 10.9 and 15.2 meters (35.8 to 49.9 ft) in size. While there’s nonetheless some uncertainty round these estimates, it is simple that Vasuki was a sizeable snake.

Its dimension is corresponding to Titanoboa, one other extinct genus of snake that measured round 12.8 to 14.3 meters (42 to 46.9 ft) in size. It’s additionally approach longer than any modern-day snake, the most important of which grows as much as 7.67 meters (25 ft, 2 inches) lengthy, in line with Guinness World Records.

Given its chonky dimension, the researchers imagine Vasuki was a slow-moving, ambush predator very like the swamp-dwelling anacondas and pythons of right now.

“As Vasuki was terrestrial/semi-aquatic, it is possible that this extinct snake preyed on a variety of animals similar to modern-day pythons,” Debajit Datta and Sunil Bajpai, the 2 research authors behind the invention, informed IFLScience. 

“It is difficult to say at this point precisely what sort of animals Vasuki preyed upon. However, it is to be noted that associated fossils of rays, sharks, catfish, turtles, crocodiles, and primitive whales were found in the same rock unit that yielded the remains of Vasuki. No land mammals were found,” they added.

Today, among the greatest animals to ever stay nonetheless roam planet Earth. However, it usually appears that prehistoric occasions had a lot bigger creatures in comparison with now, whether or not it is train-sized sauropod dinosaurs or the hulking megafauna of the final Ice Age. There’s an array of the reason why prehistoric animals advanced to such large sizes, together with totally different oxygen ranges within the air, an abundance of vegetation to feed on, and the tendency for organisms in evolving lineages to extend in dimension over time.

In regards to the Vasuki snake, the researchers suspect it’s as a result of these animals lived at a time when Earth was considerably hotter and higher suited to supporting massive cold-blooded beasts. 

“A possible reason for its large size could be the comparatively higher mean annual temperatures in Earth’s history than today. Since snakes are poikilotherms, their body temperatures are dependent on the temperature of their ambient environment, which in turn controls their body size. Therefore, higher ambient temperature can support snakes with large body sizes,” defined Datta and Bajpai. 

Alternatively, maybe the shortage of different aggressive predators – like people – allowed the snakes to develop to bigger sizes unhindered.

“Another possible reason for the smaller size of present-day snakes could be the combined effect of habitat loss (due to deforestation and human encroachment) and poaching which may have removed exceptionally large-bodied snake lineages from the present-day ecosystem,” the pair added. 

The research is printed within the journal Scientific Reports.