If you, like Indiana Jones, have a thing about snakes, add western India alongside the Amazon basin on the list of places you don’t want to go. Of course, we’re talking about the western India of about 47 million years ago, where a snake around 50 feet long and weighing in at nearly a ton lived in the forests and rivers. That weight, of course, is an estimate, as at the time the snake lived, there were no scales suitable for measuring it. Happily for us humans, it’s now extinct.
Fossilized vertebrae found near a coal mine in western India indicate that the snake was between 36 feet and 50 feet long.
This is up to eight feet longer than the largest snake known to man and nearly 17 feet longer than the current largest living snake, the Associated Press reported this week.
The snake weighed up to a ton, researchers said in a Scientific Reports article published on April 18.
The…
