Titanoboa - the largest snake

Titanoboa snake was discovered by a team of North American scientists at the University of Toronto. It's the latest fossil to emerge from Colombia's Cerrejon coal mine in 2005.

The giant serpent is closely related to today's boas and anacondas, snakes that kill their prey with suffocating coils. Titanoboa's fossilised vertebra showed that it was a whopping 13 metres (42 feet) long. It was also a hefty creature and weighed in at over 1.3 tons. That's almost thirty times as heavy as the anaconda, the bulkiest species alive today. Its superlative measurements mean that Titanoboa was not only the largest snake in history, but also the largest land-living vertebrate following the demise of the dinosaurs.

It lived some 58-60 million years ago, when the Cerrejon basin was a giant floodplain, criss-crossed by rivers and nestled within a large tropical rainforest. This is exactly the type of habitat that anacondas thrive in today, and it's likely that Titanoboa shared a similar lifestyle. It may well have been aquatic and hunted similar prey, like crocodiles. Indeed, other fossils from the Cerrejon pit include early relatives of fishes, turtles and crocodiles - all suitable prey for Titanoboa.

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