super sized snake

Reality has proven more incredible than Hollywood fantasy with the discovery of a super-sized snake that slithered around the tropics 60 million years ago.

Measuring 13 metres from its tongue to the tip of its very long tail, Titanoboa cerrejonensis is the largest snake ever uncovered.

A reconstruction illustration of the Titanoboa cerrejonensis, a relative of the Boa constrictor, was 13 metres long, weighed more than a tonne, and would have required temperatures that are hotter than in today's tropics.

It swam around warm, steamy swamps swallowing giant turtles and crocodiles, says paleontologist Jason Head, at the University of Toronto in Mississauga, lead author of a report on the boa constrictor like reptile in the journal Nature to be published Thursday.

"It was longer than a city bus, and weighed more than a car," Head said in an interview. It's body, weighing about 1,135 kilograms, was so thick he says that the snake would have had trouble getting from the hallway into his office: "It would have to squeeze a little bit to get into the door."

Head and his co-authors in the U.S. and Panama say the snake was more fantastic than Hollywood creations - and much bigger than the snake that tried to eat actor Jennifer Lopez in the movie Anaconda.

"Terrifying," Head says of the snake he describes as the "most amazing" he has ever studied.

The bones from several of the creatures were unearthed in the open-pit Cerrejon coal mine in Colombia, and provide a rare glimpse of the past tropical climate.

"We were able to actually take the giant snakes and turn them into thermometers," says Head, explaining how they have reconstructed the climate Titanoboa lived in based on the size of its bones. The growth of cold-blooded animals like snakes is determined by temperature - cold limits their size, which is why snakes are small in Canada, while warmth allows them to grow bigger in places like Brazil.

The scientists say the snake's enormous size points to a mean annual temperature at the equatorial South America 60 million years of nearly 30 to 34 Celsius, up to six degrees warmer than it is today.

Climatologist Matthew Huber, at Purdue University, says the work has "major implications" as it indicates that the tropics are not buffered from global warming as some scientists have believed. It suggests the tropics, now home to millions of people, may warm more that some have expected because of the greenhouse gases now being released into the atmosphere.

"It is a big step to go from our analysis to today's man-made global warming, but it certainly makes you scratch your chin," says Head, who is to travel to Columbia this spring to look for more snake bones in the coal mine.

"I'd like to find the head of one of those guys," he says. So far the researchers have unearthed ribs and vertebrae, some bigger than Head's hand.