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
Each bone corresponds to a specific region on the snake's back, but no one had really pieced that together before.
So Polly and Head put their heads together, and using this mathematical modeling, plotted each joint, ridge, and individual vertebrae as a set of coordinates on a graph.
And they were finally able to get an accurate picture of the snake's length.
What they unraveled was a 13 to 15 metre behemoth, weighing in with a mean of 1,135 kilograms, as much as some fully grown rhinos and the length of a school bus.
Titanoboa celihonesis, or Titanic boa constrictor, was formally named in 2009 in a Nature article, and it flipped evolutionary science on its head.
For context, the largest anaconda ever accurately measured was a mere 8.5 meters.
For some, this was the stuff of nightmares, but for the scientists who had dedicated decades to this search, it was the stuff of dreams.
They had found the largest snake ever to have been discovered.
While Titanoboa's size was enough to make headlines around the world, what scientists still didn't know was how it lived.
It was incomprehensible what type of world could produce such a monster, and crucially, what did it do to survive?
there was still one part of this monstrous jigsaw puzzle missing, a skull.
As incredible as all those discoveries we've just talked about were, the modeling only really revealed the size of the snake, which is impressive enough.
But to get a full grasp on this almost mythical creature and to further advance their research, they needed its head.
So they once again headed back to the coal mine, which by now to them surely must have felt more like a gold mine.
When they touched back down in Columbia in 2011, expectations were very low.
They'd already hit the mother load.
Surely, surely lightning couldn't strike twice.
Finding a snake vertebrae was hard enough, but finding a snake skull, well, that was a different world.
Unlike our skulls, snake skulls aren't fused together.
Instead, they're connected with tissue, tendons, ligaments, and muscles.
Showing 2941–2960 of 4,486 · page 148 of 225
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