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Paleontologists in India have unearthed a fearsome relic from the past — a giant predator snake estimated to be as large as the longest snake ever discovered. The fossilised remains, measuring 10-15 metres long, were found in Gujarat’s Panandhro Lignite Mine in Kutch and date back a staggering 47 million years.
The new species, named Vasuki indicus after the mythical serpent associated with Lord Shiva, belonged to the now-extinct Madtsoiidae snake family. The findings by researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee were published in journal Scientific Reports.
Read more: World’s oldest snake fossils discovered
Madtsoiidae are Gondwanan terrestrial snakes that lived between the Upper Cretaceous (100.5 million to 66 million years ago) and the Late Pleistocene (0.126 million years ago to 0.012 million years ago). This family of snakes is considered a pivotal group for our understanding of snake origins and evolution, a 2018 paper published in journal Royal Society Open Science stated.
The giant madtsoiid snake identified in the new study is one of the largest snakes ever reported. It lived in the warm Middle Eocene period (roughly 47 million years ago) in India.
“The discovery of a giant Eocene snake has important implications for madtsoiid biogeography in the context of Gondwanan inter-continental dispersal and the evolution of large body sizes possibly driven by high temperatures in the Middle Eocene tropical zones,” the researchers wrote in their paper.
Biogeography refers to patterns of how organisms are geographically distributed and the factors that determine those patterns.
Analysis of the 27 recovered vertebrae, some excellently preserved, suggests a formidable creature. These vertebrae — measuring between 37.5 and 62.7 millimetres in length and 62.4 and 111.4 mm in width — hint at a broad, cylindrical body.
Extrapolating from these, the authors’ estimates suggest Vasuki indicus reached lengths between 10.9 and 15.2 metres. This surpassed the size of even the largest modern snakes like the reticulated python of southeast Asia, Indonesia and the Philippines, which regularly exceeds 6.25 metres. The record length is 10 metres for a specimen shot in Celebes, Indonesia in 1912, according to Guinness World Records.
The green anaconda are among the largest snake species, with females growing more than seven metres long.
The researchers believe Vasuki indicus rivalled the infamous Titanoboa. The monstrous snake was one of the largest known predators in the period between the extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago and the first appearance of Megalodon roughly 23 million years ago.
The authors, however, acknowledge that there are uncertainties around their estimates of Vasuki indicus’s size.
They also speculate that Vasuki was perhaps too large to be an active forager and was more likely to have behaved like modern anacondas and large-bodied pythonids by ambushing and subduing its prey.
The organism lived at a time when temperatures were relatively warm, at roughly 28 °C. Vasuki indicus represents a lineage of large madtsoiids that likely originated in the Indian subcontinent before subsequently moving to Africa through southern Eurasia during the Eocene.
“The discovery of Vasuki and the sparse anatomical coverage of known madtsoiids highlight the need for a rigorous sampling of Late Cretaceous and Paleogene Gondwanan deposits.
Recovery of additional material and new taxa (including large-sized forms) may provide further insights into madtsoiid systematics (classification) and biogeography,” the researchers wrote in their paper.
Fossils of Madtsoiidae snakes have been found in India before. In 2022, researchers from Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology, Panjab University Chandigarh, Indian Institute of Technology Ropar, and Comenius University Slovakia discovered the Madtsoiidae snake from the late Oligocene (about 33.7 to 23.8 million years ago) in the Ladakh Himalaya.