The Biggest Snake to Ever Stalk the Earth | Titanoboa | Astrum Earth
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What was the world like when Titanoboa existed?
66 million years ago, dinosaurs vanished almost overnight. Forests collapsed, food chains broke apart, and extinction reigned supreme. And in the warmer world left behind, a new predator slithered to the top. What could be the largest snake the world has ever seen?
A snake longer than a bus and as heavy as a small car. It had a constricting pressure comparable to the crushing force inside an industrial car compactor.
This was an animal that could snap a giant turtle shell like a cracker in its coils and was capable of devouring two meter long crocodiles. Titanoboa was a master of disguise, silently lurking deep in the depths of South American swamps to claim its next victim. Measuring in at 14 meters long, Titanoboa was not only the largest predator on the surface of the planet for at least 10 million years, but it also carries a fascinating, unique, and truly unbelievable scientific story. I'm James Stewart, and you're watching Astrum Earth.
How did Titanoboa become the largest snake on Earth?
In this video, we'll unravel the mystery of Titanoboa, from its discovery in Colombian coal mines, to how it lived, hunted, and was able to thrive in a way never before seen amongst reptiles. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we'll ask the biggest question of them all. Where did this monstrosity go, and could it one day return?
For most of the 20th century, there was a gap in the fossil record. The first few million years following the Cretaceous-Paleogene event, one of the greatest mass extinction events in Earth's history, were poorly understood. The fossil record suggested recovery, a sort of bounce-back period that would allow previously hunted species to thrive once again. What it didn't suggest was dominance, and certainly not gigantism, and definitely not from snakes. The saga of Titanoboa has more twists and turns than the coils of the snake itself, and it begins in an unlikely place, an open-pit coal mine in Colombia. On the surface of it, Cerrejon is pretty unremarkable. Lying in the lowland tropics north of the country, some 60 miles from the Caribbean coast, it's a forbidding, seemingly endless horizon of dusty nothingness, largely stripped of vegetation, a rare brown blot on the green map of Colombia.
The area is crisscrossed with dirt roads, leading to enormous coal pits, some up to 24 kilometres in circumference.
In fact, this place is one of the world's largest coal operations, certainly the largest in South America, 700 kilometres squared, covering an area larger than the city of Chicago and employing some 10,000 workers.
The multinational corporation that runs the mine, Carbones de la Cerrejón Limited, extracted 19 million tonnes of coal in 2024 alone.
But 60 million years ago, this area looked quite different. It was a sweltering, swampy jungle, hotter and wetter than modern rainforests, dense with towering trees and teeming with colossal animals. There is some irony in that all of that organic matter formed during the Paleocene epoch actually turned in to the coal that's now being mined. Carlos Jaramillo, a paleontologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, said that Cerrejon is the best and probably the only window on a complete ancient tropical ecosystem anywhere in the world. So if you knew roughly where to look, there's a very slim chance you might find something more valuable than coal hiding in these mines. The search for the monsters of the Paleocene epoch began in the 1990s, when Colombian geologist Henry García found an unfamiliar fossil.
He wasn't quite sure what he was looking at, so he placed the specimen in a glass display case in the coal company reception, where it was labeled petrified branch and forgotten about. Now, flash forward nine years and a geology student named Fabini Herrera was hunting around in roughly the same spot when he noticed something unusual about the stones beneath his feet. He reached down and picked up a piece of sandstone, turning it over in his hands. On the other side of the stone, there was an impression of a fossil leaf etched into it.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What was the world like when Titanoboa existed?
0:00–1:18
2
How did Titanoboa become the largest snake on Earth?
1:18–5:52
3
What significant discoveries were made about Titanoboa's fossils?
5:52–10:35
4
How did scientists determine the size of Titanoboa?
10:35–12:22
5
What evidence suggests Titanoboa's hunting behavior?
12:22–14:46
6
Why was Titanoboa so much larger than modern snakes?
14:46–16:39
7
How might Titanoboa's existence impact our understanding of climate change?
16:39–18:40
8
Could Titanoboa return in the future due to climate change?
18:40–24:58
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from Astrum Space
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