Researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, have reported discovering the remains of a giant ancient snake in Gujarat, the Associated Press and CNN reported on Friday. The snake is believed to have been longer than a BEST double-decker bus operating in Bombay and may have weighed up to a tonne.
Fragments of the backbone of the reptile, named Vasuki indicus after the snake king of Indian mythology, were found near a coal mine in Kutch, Gujarat, in 2005 by study co-author Sunil Bajpai, professor of palaeontology at IIT Roorkee.
Initially, the researchers said, they thought the bones belonged to an ancient crocodile-like creature. It wasn’t until they removed sediment from the fossils during the study’s initial stage in 2023 that they “realized they were looking at the remains of an exceptionally large snake”.
The report’s authors analyzed 27 fossilized vertebrae, some still connected to one another, and compared more than 20 fossil vertebrae to skeletons of living snakes to estimate the size of the ancient creature.
The fossils suggested a snake that stretched an estimated 36-50 feet (11-15m), comparable to the largest known snake, also now extinct, at about 42 feet (13m) that lived in what is now Colombia in South America. The largest living snake is Asia’s reticulated python, which can grow up to 33 feet (10m).
The Vasuki indicus probably lived 47 million years ago in western India’s swampy evergreen forests and could have weighed up to 2,200 pounds (1 tonne), the researchers said in the journal Scientific Reports.
The researchers named it Vasuki indicus after “the mythical snake king Vasuki, who wraps himself around the neck of the Hindu deity Shiva”, co-author Debajit Datta, a postdoctoral fellow at IIT Roorkee, said.
The snake, given its size, was probably a slow-moving predator that ambushed its prey and subdued it by constriction, squeezing it to death, the study, which appeared on Thursday, said.
While it’s not clear what the snake ate, other fossils found nearby reveal that it lived in swampy areas alongside catfish, turtles, crocodiles, and primitive whales, some of which may have been its prey, Datta said.
The other extinct giant snake, Titanoboa, was discovered in Colombia and is estimated to have lived around 60 million years ago.
What these two monster snakes have in common is that they lived during periods of exceptionally warm global climates, Jason Head, a Cambridge University palaeontologist who was not involved in the study, told the Associated Press.
Snakes, being cold-blooded animals, need heat from the environment to survive. “Their internal body temperature fluctuates with the ambient temperature of the environment,” the authors said. “So, higher ambient temperatures would have increased the internal body temperature and metabolic rate of Vasuki, which in turn would have allowed it to grow so large.”
While in theory it’s possible that the current trend of climate change and global warming could bring monster-sized snakes back, Head said the climate is warming too quickly for snakes to evolve again to be giants.
The new discovery, announced just ahead of the general election in India, is certain to warm the cockles of the heart of a section of the population that has the tendency of take mythological tales literally, and which believes that Indian mythology has not been given its due.
Some years ago, another set of researchers from the Geological Survey of India had reported the discovery of what they said was the fossil of Dickinsonia tenuis, the world’s oldest known animal. The find, it was said, confirmed the formation of the supercontinent Gondwanaland 550 million years ago. That claim turned out to be a dud.
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