Giant snake remains found in South America...should I be surprised?

Paleontologists take years to report their findings to the public. Data has to be researched thoroughly and then reviewed to ensure accuracy and fact, leaving out wild speculation and excitement. Knowing this, you can be sure that the news from the University of Toronto that went public today is as accurate as it can be thus far.

Called Titanoboa, the remains of a 49+ foot long anaconda-like reptile were found in a coal pit in Columbia. The giant snake, the largest snake in the world as far as hard evidence is concerned, lived in the rain forests in South America about 60 million years ago. (For those of you who don't know, that was after dinosaurs.) Rib and vertebrae bones were found of several individuals, but unfortunately, no teeth or skulls. I really want to be able to go into a museum one day and see a skull of a 50-foot snake. That would be awesome.

Scientists claim that the snake would have been about 2,500 pounds and at its thickest point would have been about 3 feet in diameter. The other cool thing about finding this animal's remains, other than it's just plain cool, is that snake body size is directly related to the average temperatures of their environments. From the size of the specimens found in Columbia we can deduce that the average temperatures of the rain forests in South America were about 6 degrees C warmer than they are now.

That may not seem too interesting, but it's information like that that gives us a better insight into what the world was like millions of years ago. Fossils tell us a lot of things, but fossils don't record air temps or humidity. Comparing Titanoboa to giant South American snakes of today helps give us an idea of ancient atmospheric temperatures.

(And just to give you the willies, the largest recorded snakes today are about 30 feet. Titanoboa was 20 feet longer than that. However there are many unconfirmed reports of snakes in the Amazon that are closer to 60 feet.)