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Meet Vasuki indicus, among the longest snakes that ever lived

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2024-10-21 03:30:05

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Paleontologists have unearthed fossil remains of an ancient giant snake species — almost the length of a large tour bus — dating back to 47 million years old 1 , and comparable to the longest snakes that have ever lived on earth.

They found 27 well preserved fossil vertebrae of Vasuki indicus from a lignite mine in India's Gujarat state, and used them to model the estimated actual length of the snake to somewhere between 10.9 to 15.2 metres. The longest known snake at around 13 metres is the extinct Titanoboa that lived 60 million years ago in present day Colombia.

Paleontologists Sunil Bajpai and Debajit Datta at the Indian Institute of Technology in Roorkee say V. Indicus was likely a slow-moving predator that wrapped its body around the prey to squeeze it to death. It evolved in the warm Indian subcontinent and spread to Africa via Europe around 56 to 34 million years ago, they say. V. indicus flourished in forested swamps of the now arid Kutch region.

“The largest of its vertebrae is 11 cm wide,” Datta, the lead author of the study, says. They used data from living snakes and known fossil records as inputs to model its actual size.