Sunday 25 March 2012

Titanoboa the world's biggest snake returns..!!!

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A terrifying 48-foot, 2500 lbs predator who glided through forests 60 million years has been brought back to life by the Smithsonian.

Following the dinosaurs, other predators fought for supremacy. Titanoboa was the largest - an enormous snake that would dwarf any anaconda, and is the undisputed largest in history.

The Smithsonian has recreated the terrifying beast in a new television program that explores a question that scientists puzzled - why the snake was so big.






"This is a finding that seems so great it may appear to be an object of fantasy. A creature that has emerged from an imagined past by Spielberg and yes, has a name that evokes a mythical giant monster. It's called Titanoboa" announced David Royale, the head of the Smithsonian channel programming.

Smithsonian Channel has created a film that recounts the discovery of the snake 48 pounds and 2,500 feet long that there were more than 60 million years - and recreates the predator might have seemed.

The film was promoted with a life-size statue was the spectacle at the Grand Central New York.

Dr. Jonathan Bloch, a paleontologist and curator at the Natural History Museum of Florida, was part of the team that discovered the fossil of the Titanoboa.

Snake vertebrae were discovered in an area that is believed to have been an ancient forest of the Paleocene epoch.

Snake skulls are seldom, because they are extremely fragile and usually disintegrate.

"One question we had was why they get so big and think the answer is because it was much hotter in the tropics during that time.

'Titanoboa was the largest predator on earth after the extinction of dinosaurs at least 10 million years, maybe more, so this was a top predator on earth after the extinction of the dinosaurs, "said Bloch.

The fossilized remains were found in an opencast mine in Cerrejon, Colombia with turtles and crocodiles.




The creature lived during the Paleocene era - the period 10 million years that followed the destruction of the dinosaurs by a giant asteroid or comet, and helps fill a gap missing in evolution.

Before the discovery, there had been no fossil vertebrates, or animals with back bones, between 65million and 55 million years ago in tropical South America.

Dr Jason Head, the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC, said: "We now have a window in the time just after the dinosaurs went extinct and can actually see what the animals replacing them, appeared ".

He added: "This colossal, boa constrictor-like creature stretched over a city bus and weighed more than a car. It is the largest snake in the world has ever known.










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