Scientists Uncover Bones of Massive Extinct Snake, Comparable in Size to the 43-Foot Titanoboa | Good News

Paleontologists in India have unearthed fossilized bones from one of many largest snakes ever found.

In a examine, printed final week within the journal Scientific Reports, the researchers recommend the now-extinct behemoth was between 36 and 50 toes lengthy—which means it couldn’t stretch to its full size inside a faculty bus.

The scientists named the snake Vasuki indicus after Vāsuki, a Hindu legendary serpent sometimes depicted draped across the neck of Shiva, a Hindu deity.

“Vasuki is an important piece of an ancient puzzle. It contributes to our understanding of this extinct group and also to our understanding of large, apex, top-of-the-food chain snakes in general,” John Jacisin III, a paleontologist on the University of Texas at Austin who didn’t contribute to the findings, tells Popular Science’s Lauren Leffer.

The researchers dug up a partial vertebral column, composed of 27 vertebrae in whole, from a mine within the Kutch District in Gujarat State on India’s western coast. The bones are round 47 million years old and have been as massive as 2.4 inches lengthy and 4.3 inches extensive—sizeable sufficient that, after they first uncovered the fossils, the researchers thought that they had come from an extinct crocodile, studies New Scientist’s Tom Leslie.

Instead, they decided the bones belonged to a member of an extinct household of terrestrial snakes referred to as Madtsoiidae that lived for round 100 million years between the Late Cretaceous and Late Pleistocene. In their day, these serpents slithered throughout what’s now Madagascar, South America, India, Africa, Australia and Europe.

The researchers used two totally different strategies for estimating the scale of Vasuki, and each concerned evaluating its vertebrae to these of residing snakes. One technique discovered that Vasuki would have been between 36 and 40 toes lengthy, whereas the opposite predicted a size of 48 to 50 toes.

Only one different snake recognized to have ever existed can evaluate in measurement to Vasuki: the extinct Titanoboa, thought to have been round 43 toes lengthy. Titanoboa fossils date to between 58 and 60 million years in the past. Today, the most important snake alive is the reticulated python, which often grows to greater than 20 toes lengthy, and one individual reached almost 33 toes in size. Among snakes, Vasuki has the second-largest recognized vertebrae to Titanoboa.

“The estimated body length of Vasuki is comparable to that of Titanoboa, although the vertebrae of Titanoboa are slightly larger than those of Vasuki,” Sunil Bajpai, a co-author of the examine and paleontologist on the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, tells Reuters’ Will Dunham. “However, at this point, we cannot say if Vasuki was more massive or slender compared to Titanoboa.”

The scientists acknowledge their estimates for Vasuki’s size may not be fully correct, since they don’t have an entire skeleton. And they based mostly their estimates on Vasuki’s fashionable counterparts, which could not be good comparisons for the extinct species.

“Vasuki belongs to an extinct family of snakes, distantly related to pythons and anacondas, and so when you’re using existing snakes to estimate body length, there may be uncertainties,” Debajit Datta, a co-author of the examine and paleontologist additionally on the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, says to Live Science’s Jacklin Kwan.

“Caution is always warranted whenever you are extrapolating beyond the available data set,” Jacob McCartney, a paleontologist at Nazareth University who was not concerned within the analysis, tells New Scientist. “But the vertebrae of this new species are so big that they really are second in size only to those of the Colombian species Titanoboa.”

The bones the researchers dug up recommend that Vasuki had a broad and cylindrical physique with vertebrae which are equally formed to these of residing pythons. These traits point out the snake might have occupied a terrestrial or semi-aquatic habitat. Vasuki possible lived in a heat local weather of round 82 levels Fahrenheit.

Based on its massive physique measurement, the researchers theorize Vasuki was a slow-moving snake that traversed the land in straight strains. It may need been too massive to have been an energetic forager and extra possible ambushed and wrapped itself round prey to kill it, like residing anacondas and enormous pythons, the authors write.

With additional analysis—reminiscent of analyzing the fossils for components that would reveal the snakes’ food plan—the staff hopes to get extra info on the prehistoric large.

“There are still many things we don’t know about Vasuki. We don’t know about its muscles, how it used them or what it ate,” Datta says to Live Science.