James Stewart

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.

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.