why we are afraid of snakes, maybe ??? LOL 2500 lb / longer than a bus

[THE eXchanger]

Ancient Snake Was Longer Than a Bus
By MALCOLM RITTER

http://news.aol.com/article/fossil-o...e-found/329070
,

NEW YORK (Feb. 4) - Never mind the 40-foot snake that menaced Jennifer Lopez in the 1997 movie "Anaconda."

Not even Hollywood could match a new discovery from the ancient world.

Fossils from northeastern Colombia reveal the biggest snake ever discovered: a behemoth that stretched 42 to 45 feet long,
reaching more than 2,500 pounds.


'Longer Than a City Bus'
Jason Bourque, Livescience.com
3 photos

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Fossils found in Colombia reveal an ancient giant snake that stretched 42 to 45 feet long and weighed more than 2,500 pounds. "This thing weighs more than a bison and is longer than a city bus," said Jack Conrad of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. This is an artist's reconstruction of the behemoth, the biggest snake ever discovered.
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"This thing weighs more than a bison and is longer than a city bus," enthused snake expert Jack Conrad of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, who was familiar with the find.
"It could easily eat something the size of a cow. A human would just be toast immediately."
"If it tried to enter my office to eat me, it would have a hard time squeezing through the door," reckoned paleontologist Jason Head of the University of Toronto Missisauga.
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Actually, the beast probably munched on ancient relatives of crocodiles in its rainforest home some 58 million to 60 million years ago, he said.
Head is senior author of a report on the find in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.
(The same issue carries another significant report from the distant past. Scientists said they'd found the oldest known evidence of animal life, remnants of steroids produced by sponges more than 635 million years ago in Oman.)

The discoverers of the snake named it Titanoboa cerrejonensis ("ty-TAN-o-BO-ah sare-ah-HONE-en-siss"). That means "titanic boa from Cerrejon," the region where it was found.
While related to modern boa constrictors, it behaved more like an anaconda and spent almost all its time in the water, Head said. It could slither on land as well as swim.
Conrad, who wasn't involved in the discovery, called the find "just unbelievable.... It mocks your preconceptions about how big a snake can get."
Titanoboa breaks the record for snake length by about 11 feet, surpassing a creature that lived about 40 million years ago in Egypt, Head said. Among living snake species, the record holder is an individual python measured at about 30 feet long, which is some 12 to 15 feet shorter than typical Titanoboas, said study co-author Jonathan Bloch.
The beast was revealed in early 2007 at the University of Florida's Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville. Bones collected at a huge open-pit coal mine in Colombia were being unpacked, said Bloch, the museum's curator of vertebrate paleontology.

[THE eXchanger]

[QUOTE=eXchanger;109599]

http://news.aol.com/article/fossil-o...e-found/329070

also on the same link -- with a photo there

This fossil of an Asian freshwater,
tropical turtle was found in the Canadian Arctic.

Scientists writing in the journal Geology said Monday
it suggests animals migrated from Asia to North America
directly across a freshwater sea floating atop the warm, salty arctic Ocean.

Click through the gallery for other fossil finds.
(quite a few)

[THE eXchanger]

iS everyone afraid of SerpentS & SnakeS ???

[futureyes]

afraid of snakes ... no ... love handling them ...
have one ... orange and white and have had her since she was a baby ... eight or nine years now ...
she's only five feet in length ... if she grows to the size of a bus ... she's going to asked to pay rent ...
and chip in for food too

we once went away for awhile ... she got out of her tank ...
found her within a short while ... she was little then and coiled inside my son's school binder ...

it was better than when the tarantula got out ... that was a six week ordeal ... but that's another story ...