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
Titanoboa may have been the only boid of its kind, a supersized fish-hunting serpent unlike anything else we've ever seen.
This wasn't a fast, dynamic land-dwelling predator.
Moving a ton of muscle wasn't easy.
Instead, it likely lurked in swamps, taking advantage of buoyancy and using water to regulate its temperature.
This was a predator that waited for prey to come to it, lying camouflaged against the dark tannin-stained waters.
Titanoboa's size also raised bigger questions that stretched far beyond its anatomy.
Why was Titanoboa so much larger than any snake alive?
Something had to allow for this gigantism.
And as it turns out, the answer to that question also has implications for the entire planet.
And that includes us.
Snakes are ectotherms.
They depend entirely on the warmth of their surroundings to regulate their body temperature.
And this dictates pretty much everything else about them.
Their metabolism, what they eat, where they live, and of course, their size.
As such, we know that the Boyd snake family tends to live in tropical environments, especially in South America and Southeast Asia.
Here, the hot human environments allow these cold-blooded creatures to grow and to thrive.
The warmer the environment, the more energy they can absorb, the faster their metabolism, the more they eat, and thus the bigger they grow.
When the team spent all of those hours analysing fossils and building mathematical models, they weren't just looking at a fossil record, they were looking at a climate record.
Titanoboa was not an accident.
It was the outcome of an extreme world.
Showing 2981–3000 of 4,486 · page 150 of 225
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