Woah! (Anaconda/Titanoboa)

UPDATE (9/11/09): 14,000+ views for this post. Not quite sure why everyone gets directed here…

UPDATE (7/13/09): Now at 2,700+ views for this post. Still impressed by your love of snakes. As always, I’d love you have you all poke around and see if there’s anything else you like around here. Feedback encouraged.

UPDATE (6/12/09): This is by far my most viewed post, with now over 1,000 unique views. Who knew anacondas were so popular? Thanks for stopping by. Feel free to stay for a while and have a look around!

So do we all remember how big anacondas are? The really big snake from the Amazon? A reminder:

So that should put this into perspective. Anaconda on the left, Titanoboa on the right:

Ed Young’s got the scoop:

Titanoboa’s fossilised vertebra showed that it was a whopping 13 metres (42 feet) long. By comparison, the largest verifiable record for a living snake belongs to a 10-metre-long reticulated python, and that was probably a striking exception.  Large population surveys of reticulated pythons have failed to find individuals longer than 6 metres. By contrast, Head’s team analysed vertebrae from eight different specimens of Titanoboa and found that all of them were roughly the same size. A length of 13 metres was fairly ordinary for this extraordinary serpent. Not quite Jormungandr, but amazing nonetheless.

1.3 tons! Thats 30 times as massive as the anaconda! A CGI depiction to give you nightmares:

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