WASHINGTON: The fossil vertebrae found in a lignite mine contain the remnants of one of the biggest snakes ever recorded. This monster, which slithered across the marshes of India some 47 million years ago, was thought to have measured up to 49 feet (15 meters) in length, making it longer than a Tyrannosaurus rex.
On Thursday, researchers announced that they had extracted 27 vertebrae from the snake, some of which were preserved in the same orientation as when the limbless reptile was living. They said that the snake, which they named Vasuki indicus, would not have been poisonous and would have resembled a gigantic current python.
The mine is situated in Gujarat, a state in western India, in the Panandhro region of the Kutch district. The lowest grade of coal is called lignite.
Vasuki was a slow-moving ambush predator that, like pythons and anacondas, subdued its prey via constriction despite its massive size. The primary author of the study published in the journal Scientific Reports, Debajit Datta, a postdoctoral paleontologist at the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee (IITR), stated that the snake “lived in a marshy swamp near the coast at a time when global temperatures were higher than today.”
The researchers provided an approximate length range of 36–49 feet (11–15 meters) and an approximate weight estimate of a metric ton due to the fragmentary state of the Vasuki remnants.
Named for the snake monarch connected to the Hindu god Shiva, Vasuki is comparable in size to Titanoboa, another enormous prehistoric snake whose bones were found in a northern Colombian coal mine in 2009. At 42 feet (13 meters) in length and 1.1 metric tons in weight, Titanoboa lived 58–60 million years ago. The longest snake currently living is the reticulated python, which can reach lengths of 20 to 30 feet (6 to 9 meters).
“Though the vertebrae of Titanoboa are slightly larger than those of Vasuki, the estimated body length of both species is similar.
But as of right now, we are unable to determine if Vasuki was more large or slender than Titanoboa, according to paleontologist and research co-author Sunil Bajpai, an IITR professor.
The Cenozoic era, which started 66 million years ago following the end of the dinosaur era, is when these enormous snakes lived. Though a Tyrannosaurus rex would have been more gigantic than these snakes, Sue, a specimen at the Field Museum in Chicago, is 40-1/2 feet (12.3 meters) long, making it possibly the largest known Tyrannosaurus rex.
