It reaches a length of 15 meters...the discovery of a giant extinct snake in India, which was perhaps the largest
It reaches a length of 15 meters...the discovery of a giant extinct snake in India, which was perhaps the largest
New research conducted by researchers Debajit Datta and Sunil Bajpai from the Department of Earth Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology in Roorkee, India, shows a type of extinct snake that lived about 47 million years ago in the state of Gujarat, India.
This snake is likely to be the largest snake that has ever lived, with an estimated length of between 11 and 15 metres.
This snake belongs to the extinct “Madtsweid” snake family.
The discovered snake was named “Vasuki Indicus” after the snake Vasuki that coiled around the neck of the legendary god Shiva.
The research, which was published in Scientific Reports on April 18, 2024, stated that the fossils were extracted from the Panandro Lignite mine in Kutch, Gujarat, India, and represent a partial spine of the snake.
The fossils date back to the early Middle Eocene era, about 47 million years ago, and they consist of 27 vertebrae that appear to be of a fully-grown snake, perfectly preserved, and the vertebrae include a small number of jointed vertebrae.
The length of these vertebrae ranges between 37.5 and 62.7 mm, and their width is 62.4 and 111.4 mm, indicating a wide, cylindrical body of the snake.
Accordingly, the study estimated that the length of the snake may range between 10.9 and 15.2 metres, which is therefore larger than the longest known snake, which is the extinct Titanoboa snake, which was about 13 meters long and was discovered in 2009 in excavations excavated five years ago.
Researchers estimate that this large size of the “Vasuki” snake indicates that it was a slow-moving snake, and may have adopted a straight movement mechanism.
Because of its very large size, it was not an active forager and was most likely a predator that could subdue its prey through constriction, similar to modern anacondas and large snakes.
Madtsuites are extinct terrestrial snakes that existed about 100 million years ago, from the late Cretaceous to the late Pleistocene era, and lived in a wide geographical range that included Madagascar, South America, India, Africa, the European Archipelago, and Australia.
It is considered one of the largest terrestrial snakes ever, and scientists identified most of its species through the bony vertebrae they discovered.
The “Vasuki indicus” snake belongs to a large subspecies of Madtsoi snakes that originated in the Indian subcontinent, and the subsequent collision between India and Asia about 50 million years ago led to the spread of this subcontinent across the continents from the Indian subcontinent to North Africa via southern Eurasia.
Source: websites