James Stewart
speaker
4,486 appearances
22 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 4d ago
James Stewart’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 17 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 3.
Appearances
Astrum Space · The Biggest Snake to Ever Stalk the Earth | Titanoboa | Astrum Earth · 12 May 2026
podcast
Now the most amazing part about all this is that Jonathan Block himself had also been sifting through specimens over the last couple of years, and he had also received giant vertebrae just like this one, but even someone with his expertise had totally dismissed them.
He said it's like someone handed me a mouse skull the size of a rhinoceros and told me that's a mouse.
It's just not possible, except now he realised that it was.
The only problem was they had no idea what kind of snake they were dealing with.
Realising what was at stake, Block called Jason Head, then at the University of Toronto, the world's leading snake expert at the time.
After exchanging a few images, Jason Head booked his ticket to Florida that night.
The pair got to work immediately, honing in on the vertebrae from two different individual snakes.
And that's when Head spotted it.
The creature had a very clear T-shaped spine, with bones unique to only one type of animal, Boyd snakes, the lineage that includes boa constrictors and anacondas.
Now, both of these snakes are common in these parts.
Boas can reach up to 4.2 metres in length and anacondas can exceed 6 metres.
So that was nothing crazy, but something was wrong.
The bones they were looking at seemed to suggest this unknown creature was more closely related to boas, but where it had been found in Cerrejon was more akin to the habitat of a modern South American anaconda, a river and swamp dwelling snake comfortable in the water.
And there was another problem too.
You see, they still could not grasp the true size of just what they were dealing with.
Snakes are tricky.
They rarely end up being fossilized as their bones are very delicate and break, which means it's very hard to find an intact and complete skeleton.
But the team had one final trick up their sleeve.
Mathematics.
Up in Indiana, whilst the team in Florida had been analysing samples, another paleontologist, David Polley, had spent the last two years building what was essentially a mathematical model of how a snake's spinal column looks, based of course on living species.
Showing 2921–2940 of 4,486 · page 147 of 225
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