James Stewart

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.

For a snake to grow this big, those hot, humid temperatures would need to be supersized almost as much as the snake itself.

The team estimated that to grow to this size, Titanoboa must have lived in an extremely warm climate, a far warmer ambient average than we see today, with year-round temperatures between 30 and 34 degrees Celsius with no let-up.

the Paleocene tropics were a scorching, sweaty sauna.

The same concept applies to other reptiles too, explaining the turtle shells the size of snooker tables and humongous crocs, the very things Titanoboa would eat for breakfast.

Remember those fossilized leaves we talked about earlier on?