While anacondas and pythons, the largest known snakes alive today, can reach over 30 feet long and swallow antelope whole, they are dwarfed in size by the newly discovered Titanoboa cerrejonensis, a serpent that lived during the Paleocene epoch whose bones were unearthed recenty in a Colombia coal mine. By analyzing the snake's vertebrae, paleontologists were able to determine that Titanoboa measured over 42 feet long and weighed more than 1.3 tons—nearly 30 times the mass of an anaconda.
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Named Titanoboa cerrejonensis by its discoverers, the size of the snake's vertebrae suggest it weighed 1140 kg (2,500 pounds) and measured 13 metres (42.7 feet) nose to tail tip. A report describing the find appears in this week's Nature.
Drs Jason Head…
In a fairly hilarious slip, yesterday a USA Today said researchers had found a 2500 foot snake fossil in Colombia.  Uh, make that a 2500 pound snake (it was about 40 feet long). But still:  BIG SNAKE!!  And it was 65 million years old (OLD SNAKE!!).  The Independent's headline called it, "The…