Five-million-year-old poison snake found
Here's a slithery creature that makes a rattlesnake look as menacing as an earthworm.
Scientists have found a partial fossil of what may be the world's largest venomous snake. Some 10 to 13 feet long and as much as 55 pounds – the average weight of an 8-year-old -- it would lie in wait for prey in the grasslands and forests of northern Greece 5 million years ago, then inject its victims with poison through super-long fangs. It was a top predator, eating anything it could catch.
"It was feeding on small mammals – or perhaps not so small," says Georgios Georgalis, who was a student at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece when he led the team that analyzed the fossil. "It was a very scary but impressive animal. One can feel only awe and admiration that this snake was once living on our planet."
He and his colleagues presented their finding this week at a meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology.
It would seem difficult to lose track of such a large creature, but somehow London's Natural History Museum managed to do so. In the mid-1800s, 13 vertebrae of a colossal viper unknown to science fell into the hands of museum founder and renowned British naturalist Richard Owen.
He christened the massive animal Laophis crotaloides, and which can be translated to something like "the rattlesnake-like snake of the people" - or, the people's snake. Then the bones vanished – tucked into the wrong drawer, perhaps, or given away.
"They were just lost, and this giant snake disappeared into the pages of history," says paleontologist Benjamin Kear of Uppsala University in Sweden, one of Georgalis's co-authors.
Decades later, paleoherpetologist Massimo Delfino of Italy's University of Turin was sifting through reptile fossils in a Dutch museum when he opened a box and saw a fragment of bone.
It was the vertebra of a massive venomous snake, and it had come from the same site as the 13 vertebrae first described more than 100 years earlier. The people's snake had slithered back into the limelight.
By extrapolating from the size of the vertebra, the researchers showed the people's snake is not the world's longest venomous snake, a title claimed by the king cobra, which can reach 16 feet. But it may very well be the heaviest venomous snake.
There are reports that Gaboon vipers, thick-bodied snakes that live in Africa, can bulk up to more than 55 pounds, but none of those claims have been verified, paleontologist Alexander Hastings of Germany's Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg says via email.
If the Laophis estimate is correct, he says, Laophis would indeed be the heaviest known venomous snake, though he cautions that it's tricky to make an estimate based on a single specimen.
The people's snake wasn't the only creature of its time and place to live large. A giant python thrived in northern Greece, too, as did "colossal tortoises" with shells up to 6-1/2 feet long, Kear says.
"This is like cars walking around. … The question, is why is this? What's going on here?" The largest reptiles are normally found in the tropics, whereas the Greece of Laophis's heyday was relatively cool and dry during part of the year.
By studying the people's snake and its environment, the scientists hope to understand the conditions that once allowed giant reptiles to flourish well before Homo sapiens was around to worry about them.