What If Titanoboa Snake Wouldn't Die Out

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What If Titanoboa Snake Wouldn't Die Out

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Today, the anaconda is believed to be one of the biggest snakes in the world. They owe this to their sheer size and the capability to swallow things whole. Sometimes they have been known to swallow even a goat or deer whole. But have you heard of the snake christened Titanoboa? This ferocious giant was found in the period of dinosaurs and was infinitely bigger than Anaconda or any other reptile that there is in existence today. It is to this day thought to be the biggest snake ever-present on earth, aptly earning the name, 'monster snake'.

Titanoboa, discovered by Museum scientists, was the largest snake that ever lived. Estimated to be up to 50 feet long and 3 feet wide, this snake was the top predator in the world’s first tropical rainforest. It was also the largest known predator on the planet between the extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago and the first appearance of Megalodon, about 23 million years ago.
Titanoboa cerrjonensis is the world’s largest snake, as far as we know. Scientists estimate that it could’ve weighed over a ton. With all of these dimensions in mind, most of us would find it quite difficult to imagine what this would mean in terms of the size of a snake. Therefore, one of the ways we could imagine it would be, dwelling on the fact that if it were to try to come in, maybe through your office door, then it would have to squeeze itself to get to you. Well, hopefully, that provides us with a better image of the Titanoboa. This was a truly gigantic creature. In fact, it would pass as the largest predator that we know of on the face of the planet, following the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Titanoboa was so huge, it stretched the limits of what we thought was possible in terms of being able to survive on land and while remaining in sync with the laws of physics. Every living being has only been able to evolve under the restraints of gravity but it seems with the Titanoboa evolution broke the literal laws of the universe and produced the biggest belly crawler ever, only because gravity doesn’t affect giants as much in the sea.
Fossils of Titanoboa cerrjonensis were found in a coal mine in northern Colombia, in tropical South America. The age of the rocks that they were found in, is about 58 million years old. What was really exciting about the coal mine initially, was that it preserved the ancient remnants of a rainforest. This had to be the oldest evidence for a rainforest that we’d had from South America. As the scientists moved around the area, they started spotting bones of the animals. It was an exciting experience, I mean, they literally felt like they were opening a window into the past. They were traveling back, still in tropical South America, but a few million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs and trying to figure out what these creatures looked like. While exploring this scenery, one of the things they found was this humongous snake.

The first question they asked themselves was, "Why don't we have such large snakes in the rainforests of South America today?" This specific snake seems to be related to boas and anacondas. Hence, another question would be, why don't they get bigger than this? We assume that the answer to that question could be attributed to South America being much hotter about 58 million years ago. This is very important for species like the Titanoboa because, as cold-blooded vertebrates, they gain their body temperature from the temperature of the environment in which they are in. This is different from warm-blooded animals, who derive their temperature from the foods they eat. As a result, cold-blooded reptiles are unable to get beyond a certain temperature without their metabolism slowing so far down that they may fail to, for example, have the ability to eat at a certain temperature. Given the temperatures at the equator, there live the largest snakes today and they are able to grow as large as they possibly can. Scientists say that the one thing that would give us the ability to build a larger snake, would be relaxing those temperatures. Those temperatures would then become warmer. Therefore, they think that Titanoboa had grown as large as it did because the temperatures could have even been as high as 10 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than they are today.