66 million years ago, dinosaurs vanished
almost overnight,
forests collapsed, food chains broke
apart, and extinction reigned supreme.
And in the warmer world left behind, a
new predator slithered to the top. What
could be the largest snake the world has
ever seen.
A snake longer than a bus and as heavy
as a small car. It had a constricting
pressure comparable to the crushing
force inside an industrial car
compactor.
This was an animal that could snap a
giant turtle shell like a cracker in its
coils and was capable of devouring 2 m
long crocodiles.
Titanob was a master of disguise,
silently lurking deep in the depths of
South American swamps to claim its next
victim. Measuring in at 14 m long,
Titanob was not only the largest
predator on the surface of the planet
for at least 10 million years, but it
also carries a fascinating, unique, and
truly unbelievable scientific story. I'm
James Shu and you're watching Astramm
Earth. In this video, we'll unravel the
mystery of Titanoboa. From its discovery
in Colombian coal mines to how it lived,
hunted, and was able to thrive in a way
never before seen amongst reptiles.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly,
we'll ask the biggest question of them
all. Where did this monstrosity go? And
could it one day return?
For most of the 20th century, there was
a gap in the fossil record. The first
few million years following the
Cretaceous Paleogene event, one of the
greatest mass extinction events in
Earth's history, were poorly understood.
The fossil records suggested recovery, a
sort of bounceback period that would
allow previously hunted species to
thrive once again.
What it didn't suggest was dominance and
certainly not gigantism and definitely
not from snakes.
The saga of Titanoboa has more twists
and turns than the coils of the snake
itself. And it begins in an unlikely
place, an open pit coal mine in
Colombia. On the surface of it, Ted Horn
is pretty unremarkable.
Lying in the land tropics north of the
country, some 60 mi from the Caribbean
coast, it's a forbidding, seemingly
endless horizon of dusty nothingness
largely stripped of vegetation. A rare
brown blot on the green map of Colombia.
The area is crisscrossed with dirt roads
leading to enormous coal pits, some up
to 24 km in circumference.
In fact, this place is one of the
world's largest coal operations.
Certainly the largest in South America,
700 km squared, covering an area larger
than the city of Chicago and employing
some 10,000 workers. The multinational
corporation that runs the mine, Carbon
Deed Horn Limited, extracted 19 million
tons of coal in 2024 alone.
But 60 million years ago, this area
looked quite different. It was a
sweltering swampy jungle, hotter and
wetter than modern rainforests, dense
with towering trees and teeming with
colossal animals.
There is some irony in that all of that
organic matter formed during the
Paleocin epoch actually turned in to the
coal that's now being mined. Carlos
Haram, a paleontologist at the
Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute,
said that Sedihon is the best and
probably the only window on a complete
ancient tropical ecosystem anywhere in
the world. So, if you knew roughly where
to look, there's a very slim chance you
might find something more valuable than
coal hiding in these mines.
The search for the monsters of the
Paleocene epoch began in the 1990s when
Colombian geologist Henry Garia found an
unfamiliar fossil. He wasn't quite sure
what he was looking at, so he placed the
specimen in a glass display case in the
Cole Company reception where it was
labeled petrified branch and forgotten
about. Now, flash forward 9 years and a
geology student named Fabony Herrera was
hunting around in roughly the same spot
when he noticed something unusual about
the stones beneath his feet. He reached
down and picked up a piece of sandstone.
Turning it over in his hands. On the
other side of the stone, there was an
impression of a fossil leaf etched into
it. He picked up another rock and the
same thing happened again and then again
and again and again. He had stumbled
upon a set of beautifully preserved
fossil leaves which he brought to the
attention of Carlos Haram, who we
mentioned before. Now, if like me,
you're thinking, "What's so special
about fossilized leaves?" Well, yeah,
fair enough. But they were about to
reveal something far more intimidating,
almost entirely by accident. Delighted
with his leafy findings, Haramo
immediately reached out to Scott Wing of
the Smithsonian, an expert on Paleocene
plants, and momentum began to gather.
Now, what made this era particularly
unique was that most fossils near the
equator tend to end up buried beneath
millions of tons of soil and vegetation
and are largely inaccessible. But at
Serhon, where humans have been whittling
away at the ground for years in the
quest for coal, well, there was now
nothing in the way. Wing, fascinated by
this discovery, wanted to see the mine
for himself. When he arrived, however,
it wasn't the fossilized leaves that
caught his attention, but rather the
long-forgotten petrified branch that had
been gathering dust in the display case
at the reception for nearly a decade.
Wing's instincts kicked in here and he
started taking pictures through the
glass with his camera. He then emailed
the images of the branch over to
paleontologist Jonathan Block of the
University of Florida Museum of Natural
History in Gainesville. Unbeknown to
Wing at the time, the email he had just
sent was about to profoundly sharpen our
entire understanding of evolution. In
Block's own words, he flipped out when
his inbox pingked and then the
floodgates opened. What Block was
looking at was not some petrified stick,
but the jawbone of a land animal. There
was a terrestrial vertebrate of an age
never before seen in these parts. Block
identified the jawbone as belonging to a
group of extinct crocodiles called
dyrosaurs, one of the largest marine
vertebrates to survive the great
extinction event. And where one fossil
was, there were usually many more.
Fueled by a newfound sense of urgency,
in 2004, Block and Wing planned a trip
back to the Sihorn mine. They called
Garcia, the finder of the petrified
branch turned extinct crop drawer, to
ask where exactly to focus their search.
The answer was an area in the north of
the mine, particularly exposed and left
baking in the extreme heat. An area
called Laente Cut, covering some 6,000
acres. The conditions were brutal.
Temperatures reached well over 30° C
with zero vegetation for shade. It was
lashed by 40 km per hour gusts of wind,
methane fires, and rain that each day
would erase all of their hard work from
the day before. Nevertheless, they
persisted. Their patience was finally
rewarded, and the spoils were plenty.
They grabbed everything they saw. You
name it. Ribs, vertebrae, bits of
pelvis, shoulder blades, and even
gigantic turtle shells, some of which
were 1.5 m in diameter. Three new
crocodilian species were discovered
during this process. One of which was
between 4.5 and 7 m long. Another beast
they found had a death bite capable of
piercing a shell half a meter thick.
This truly was shaping up to be the land
of the giants. So they bagged up all
these different bits and pieces they
could find in plaster cast and sent them
back to Gainesville in Florida for Block
and his team to analyze. And they kept
this up for five years.
to our search for the world's largest snake.
It was now 2007 and Alex Hastings, a
then grad student at the University of
Florida, was going about his now daily
task of unwrapping the vast array of
packages that landed on his door from
Colombia.
In amongst these, he came across a
single vertebra, strange looking and
enormous. Based on its size alone, it
was labeled as a croc. But Hastings knew
instantly that something was different
about this one. This was not a crocodile
at all. So he showed it to his lab
partner, Jason Bour, who agreed. "That's
a snake," he said. "But this was not
like any snake the world had ever seen."
Bour raided the university's fossil
collection, pulling out the closest
looking vertebrae he could find, that of
an anaconda. It wasn't a perfect match,
although it looked quite similar. The
only problem was the anaconda vertebrae
was three times smaller than the new
fossil they had just received. How could
a snake be this big? Surely, it just
wasn't possible. They needed more
evidence. They sent word back to the
team on the ground in Colombia that more
specimens were needed, specifically of
fossilized snakes. Eventually, the team
collected 100 snake vertebrae from
nearly 30 individual gigantic snakes.
Now, the most amazing part about all
this is that Jonathan Block himself had
also been sifting through specimens over
the last couple of years. And he had
also received giant vertebrae just like
this one. But even someone with his
expertise had totally dismissed them. He
said, "It's like someone handed me a
mouse skull the size of a rhinoceros and
told me that's a mouse. It's just not
possible." Except now he realized that
it was. The only problem was they had no
idea what kind of snake they were
dealing with. Realizing what was at
stake, Block called Jason Head, then at
the University of Toronto, the world's
leading snake expert at the time. After
exchanging a few images, Jason Head
booked his ticket to Florida that night.
The pair got to work immediately honing
in on the vertebrae from two different
individual snakes. And that's when Head
spotted it. The creature had a very
clear T-shaped spine with bones unique
to only one type of animal. Boyd snakes,
the lineage that includes boa
constrictors and anacondas. Now, both of
these snakes are common in these parts.
Boas can reach up to 4.2 m in length and
anacondas can exceed 6 m. So, that was
nothing crazy, but but something was
wrong. The bones they were looking at
seemed to suggest this unknown creature
was more closely related to boas. But
where it had been found in Selhon was
more akin to the habitat of a modern
South American anaconda, a river and
swamp dwelling snake comfortable in the
water. And there was another problem,
too. You see, they still could not grasp
the true size of just what they were
dealing with. Snakes are tricky. They
rarely end up being fossilized as their
bones are very delicate and break, which
means it's very hard to find an intact
and complete skeleton. But the team had
one final trick up their sleeve.
Mathematics.
Up in Indiana, whilst the team in
Florida had been analyzing samples,
another paleontologist, David Polly, had
spent the last two years building what
was essentially a mathematical model of
how a snake's spinal column looks based,
of course, on living species.
Each bone corresponds to a specific
region on the snake's back. But no one
had really pieced that together before.
So Polly and Head put their heads
together and using this mathematical
modeling plotted each joint, ridge, and
individual vertebrae as a set of
coordinates on a graph. And they were
finally able to get an accurate picture
of the snake's length. What they
unraveled was a 13 to 15 m behemoth
weighing in with a mean of 1,135
kg, as much as some fully grown rhinos.
and the length of a school bus.
Titanoboa selhonosis or titanic boa
constrictor was formally named in 2009
in a Nature article and it flipped
evolutionary science on its head. For
context, the largest anaconda ever
accurately measured was a mere 8.5 m.
For some, this was the stuff of
nightmares. But for the scientists who
had dedicated decades to this search, it
was the stuff of dreams. They had found
the largest stake ever to have been
discovered. While Titanoboa's size was
enough to make headlines around the
world, what scientists still didn't know
was how it lived? It was
incomprehensible. What type of world
could produce such a monster? And
crucially, what did it do to survive?
There was still one part of this
monstrous jigsaw puzzle missing. A
skull. As incredible as all those
discoveries we've just talked about
were, the modeling only really revealed
the size of the snake, which is
impressive enough, but to get a full
grasp on this almost mythical creature.
And to further advance their research,
they needed its head.
So, they once again headed back to the
coal mine, which by now to them surely
must have felt more like a gold mine.
When they touched back down in Colombia
in 2011, expectations were very low.
They'd already hit the motherload.
Surely, surely lightning couldn't strike
twice. Finding a snake vertebrae was
hard enough, but finding a snake's
skull, well, that was a different world.
Unlike our skulls, snake skulls aren't
fused together. Instead, they're
connected with tissue, tendons,
ligaments, and muscles. What that means
essentially is that when the great beast
dies, that connective tissue would
simply decompose, and all those tiny
little bones would just disperse. This
wasn't even a needle in a haystack kind
of situation. They were looking for
fragments at best. And miraculously,
that is exactly what they found. Call it
divine intervention, luck, or just
knowing what they were looking for this
time. Block and head were able to find
three individual skull bones. They spent
weeks meticulously comparing the
contours of those individual bones
against modern boa, anaconda, and python
skulls. This was not glamorous work.
These weren't the big headlines that I'm
now talking to you about in this video.
This was painstaking, laborious hours of
looking under microscopes for the
tiniest of differences. And not for the
first time, that patience was rewarded.
The fragment suggested Titanoboa's whole
head could have been nearly a meter in
length. It had a special hinge bone,
too, a quadrate that connected its lower
jaw to its skull. Now, that allowed the
back of the lower jaw to extend behind
its brain. This thing opened its mouth
big and wide, and it was full of closely
packed teeth, too. Now, interestingly,
those closely compacted teeth are a
trait found in modern snakes today that
specialize in eating fish, but no known
boa alive today actively specializes in
hunting fish. All of that evidence
points to a semi-aquatic lifestyle for
Titanoboa, with behavior more like
today's water dwelling anaconda than a
boa constrictor. But they still couldn't
say for sure if it was more boa than
anaconda. With a skull that showed a
shallow quadrate angle and its
preference for a swampy habitat filled
with giant fish nearby, a new picture
emerged. Titanobo may have been the only
boy of its kind. A superized fish
hunting serpent unlike anything else
we've ever seen. This wasn't a fast,
dynamic land dwelling predator. Moving a
ton of muscle wasn't easy. Instead, it
likely lurked in swamps, taking
advantage of buoyancy and using water to
regulate its temperature. This was a
predator that waited for prey to come to
it, lying camouflaged against the dark,
tannin stained waters. Titanoboa's size
also raised bigger questions that
stretch far beyond its anatomy. Why was
Titanoboa so much larger than any snake
alive? Something had to allow for this
gigantism. And as it turns out, the
answer to that question also has
implications for the entire planet and
that includes us. Snakes are ectotherms.
They depend entirely on the warmth of
their surroundings to regulate their
body temperature. And this dictates
pretty much everything else about them.
Their metabolism, what they eat, where
they live, and of course, their size. As
such, we know that the Boyd snake family
tends to live in tropical environments,
especially in South America and
Southeast Asia. Here, the hot human
environments allow these cold-blooded
creatures to grow and to thrive. The
warmer the environment, the more energy
they can absorb, the faster their
metabolism, the more they eat, and thus
the bigger they grow. When the team
spent all of those hours analyzing
fossils and building mathematical
models, they weren't just looking at a
fossil record. They were looking at a
climate record. Titanobo was not an
accident. It was the outcome of an
extreme world. For a snake to grow this
big, those hot, humid temperatures would
need to be superersized almost as much
as the snake itself. The team estimated
that to grow to this size, Titanoboa
must have lived in an extremely warm
climate, a far warmer ambient average
than we see today, with year round
temperatures between 30 and 34° C with
no letup. The Paleocene tropics were a
scorching, sweaty sauna. The same
concept applies to other reptiles, too.
Explaining the turtle shells the size of
snooker tables and humongous crocs, the
very things Titanobo would eat for
breakfast. Remember those fossilized
leaves we talked about earlier on? Well,
they backed this theory up, too. Studies
of carbon isotopes and leaf pores from
those samples indicated atmospheric
carbon dioxide levels were about 50%
higher than they are today, likely
driving those high land temperatures.
So, what if I told you that a 60
million-year-old snake the size of a bus
lurking in a relentless swampy jungle
could actually impact us here on Earth
today? You see, these findings help
scientists understand how ecosystems
respond to warming. Rising greenhouse
gases are currently heating the planet,
and extreme temperatures can cause plant
and animal die-offs. We've seen that
already, sadly, in some parts of the
world. Plants, for example, may
eventually reach a point where they can
no longer photosynthesize effectively
and they begin to die. Yet, during
Titanoboa's time, the region supported a
lush, highly productive forest. So, how
can both things be true? What this
suggests is that there are some
ecosystems that can thrive in very warm
conditions if they have enough time to
adapt. Because the plants and ecosystems
in this region have already coped with
those really high levels of CO2, it
might mean that those plants and animals
already have the genetic ability to cope
with global warming. And that raises a
big question. Could therefore Titanoba
return as our planet continues to warm?
The news is either terrifying or
exciting depending on your view because
Dr. Haram, the guy that started this
whole thing off, says there's a chance.
Before I get your hopes up too much, the
key difference here is time scale.
Ancient warming happened over millions
of years, and this gave the species time
to evolve. Today's climate change is
occurring over just centuries and in
some cases even quicker than that, which
may not allow enough time for many
species to adjust in the same way. In
other words, if Titanoboa is coming
back, we certainly wouldn't be around to
worry about it. But what if we didn't
have to wait at all? What if it was
already out there and we just haven't
seen it yet? I know that sounds pretty
wild, but rather like Megalodon, the
internet is alive with those convinced a
bus-sized snake is still lying in weight
somewhere out there right now. After
all, large sways of the Amazon are still
largely unexplored. So, it could be
hiding, right? Wrong. Titanoboa, as
we've discussed, lived in a very
specific climate that no longer exists,
even at our current rate of global
warming. Moreover, not only have there
been no credible sightings or remains of
any 12 m snakes found, we sort of don't
need there to be. Titanoboa was the apex
predator during its time. If it were
still alive today, hidden or not, the
food chain would look very different.
And so would pretty much every animal it
once ate, all that remains of this once
great monster now is found in fossils,
not forests. The story of Titanoboa
strikes a special balance of mystery and
science. It was an animal almost beyond
comprehension. a snake that outsizes
anything we know. And for years, its
very existence was unknown to us. Buried
in rock. Through scientific curiosity
and the sheer perseverance and
collaboration of so many individuals
over so many years, they were able to
come together to make something great,
to decode its life piece by piece. What
emerged is not a myth or a movie
monster, but something far more
intriguing. A real creature that tells
us about the extremes of nature. And
there might still be more to come. In
the last two years, scientists in India
have uncovered another snake vertebrae.
Vertebrae in the same league as
Titanoboa dubbed Vuki indicus. The
vertebrae found are 11 cm in diameter,
which is not far off Titanoboa. We'll
watch to see what new clues are found in
the months to come. And who knows, maybe
Titanoboa's title is under threat. Until
then, this great creature continues to
spark the sense of awe that comes with
realizing that such a world truly
existed. If you got this far in the
video, thank you. Uh, please let me know
by dropping a snake emoji in the
comments as a tribute to this wondrous
freak of nature.