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
What that means essentially is that when the great beast dies, that connective tissue would simply decompose and all those tiny little bones would just disperse.
This wasn't even a needle in a haystack kind of situation.
They were looking for fragments at best.
And miraculously, that is exactly what they found.
Call it divine intervention, luck, or just knowing what they were looking for this time.
Block and Head were able to find three individual skull bones.
They spent weeks meticulously comparing the contours of those individual bones against modern boa, anaconda and python skulls.
This was not glamorous work.
These weren't the big headlines that I'm now talking to you about in this video.
This was painstaking, laborious hours of looking under microscopes for the tiniest of differences.
And not for the first time, that patience was rewarded.
The fragment suggested Titanoboa's whole head could have been nearly a meter in length.
It had a special hinge bone too, a quadrate, that connected its lower jaw to its skull.
Now that allowed the back of the lower jaw to extend behind its brain.
This thing opened its mouth big and wide, and it was full of closely packed teeth too.
Now, interestingly, those closely compacted teeth are a trait found in modern snakes today that specialise in eating fish.
But no known boa alive today actively specialises in hunting fish.
All of that evidence points to a semi-aquatic lifestyle for Titanoboa, with behaviour more like today's water-dwelling anaconda than a boa constrictor.
But they still couldn't say for sure if it was more boa than anaconda.
With a skull that showed a shallow quadrate angle and its preference for a swampy habitat filled with giant fish nearby, a new picture emerged.
Showing 2961–2980 of 4,486 · page 149 of 225
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