Jonathan Bloch, a curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Florida Museum of Natural History, discusses the discovery of Titanoboa, the world’s largest snake known to science, which would have been 40- to 50-feet long. The fossil was recovered from the Cerrejón coal mine in Colombia and identified by Florida Museum scientists.
Interview and videos produced by Katie Cardenas for Explore Research at the University of Florida.
Transcript
Jonathan Bloch: After the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, on land animals diversified, many new species came to be. Most of our information about what happens on land happened – it happens at higher latitudes. So, at places that are not in the tropics. The reason for that is because the forests in the tropics covers up the rocks and that’s why we don’t have a really good idea of what’s going on in the tropics even though we want to know what’s going on there since most of the biodiversity on the planet today is in these very warm tropical environments, and so in the past you’d think that would also be the case.
The Cerrejón coal mine provides us with a unique opportunity to open the window into that past, right after the extinction of the dinosaurs in South America, and what we see when we look through that window is the first evidence for the tropical rainforest, including many of the plants that we recognize in the tropics today.
What was really incredible was that there were just bones everywhere. We went out onto these large slopes that represented the slopes where they’d peel back these huge seams of coal and underneath those seams of coal you could see pieces of bone absolutely everywhere.
These were bones of animals that had never been seen before. These were new to science. They were all new animals. So we went in and collected as all the bones that we could see pretty much. We collected, you know, bones from this animals and right away we started recognizing things like crocodiles and turtles and fish, things that were very easily recognizable. Along with that we started to collect bones of an animal that we weren’t sure what it was. We thought maybe they were – they belonged to some of the crocodile relatives that we were picking up.
Once we got those bones back to the lab we unwrapped them many months later and it turned out that they were the bones of the giant snake Titanoboa cerrejonensis, the largest snake in the world, which literally, at that time, represented the largest predator on the planet for probably between 10 and 20 million years.
This would have been an animal that as it was slithering past you, would have slithered by just underneath your waist and would have been somewhere in the 40-foot to 50-foot long range, and we didn’t recognize them the snakes when we were collecting them initially because they were just so large. It would be like finding the bones of a mouse the size of an elephant, you know, you wouldn’t expect to see that.
We think these reptiles became so large because it was much warmer in the past than it is today and so that allowed these cold blooded animals to become larger than what we see in even in the warmest parts of the planet today.
Learn more about the Vertebrate Paleontology collection at the Florida Museum.