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Found this on AOL News. Just copyed and pasted.

Ancient Snake Was Longer Than a BusBy MALCOLM RITTER, AP
posted: 20 MINUTES AGOcomments: 366filed under: Animal News, Science NewsPrintShareText SizeAAANEW YORK (Feb. 4) - Never mind the 40-foot snake that menaced Jennifer Lopez in the 1997 movie "Anaconda." Not even Hollywood could match a new discovery from the ancient world. Fossils from northeastern Colombia reveal the biggest snake ever discovered: a behemoth that stretched 42 to 45 feet long, reaching more than 2,500 pounds.
"This thing weighs more than a bison and is longer than a city bus," enthused snake expert Jack Conrad of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, who was familiar with the find.

"It could easily eat something the size of a cow. A human would just be toast immediately."
"If it tried to enter my office to eat me, it would have a hard time squeezing through the door," reckoned paleontologist Jason Head of the University of Toronto Missisauga.
Actually, the beast probably munched on ancient relatives of crocodiles in its rainforest home some 58 million to 60 million years ago, he said.
Skip over this content Head is senior author of a report on the find in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.
(The same issue carries another significant report from the distant past. Scientists said they'd found the oldest known evidence of animal life, remnants of steroids produced by sponges more than 635 million years ago in Oman.)
The discoverers of the snake named it Titanoboa cerrejonensis ("ty-TAN-o-BO-ah sare-ah-HONE-en-siss"). That means "titanic boa from Cerrejon," the region where it was found.

While related to modern boa constrictors, it behaved more like an anaconda and spent almost all its time in the water, Head said. It could slither on land as well as swim.
Conrad, who wasn't involved in the discovery, called the find "just unbelievable.... It mocks your preconceptions about how big a snake can get."
Titanoboa breaks the record for snake length by about 11 feet, surpassing a creature that lived about 40 million years ago in Egypt, Head said. Among living snake species, the record holder is an individual python measured at about 30 feet long, which is some 12 to 15 feet shorter than typical Titanoboas, said study co-author Jonathan Bloch.
The beast was revealed in early 2007 at the University of Florida's Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville. Bones collected at a huge open-pit coal mine in Colombia were being unpacked, said Bloch, the museum's curator of vertebrate paleontology.
Graduate students unwrapping the fossils "realized they were looking at the bones of a snake. Not only a snake, but a really big snake."

So they quickly consulted the skeleton of a 17-foot anaconda for comparison. A backbone from that creature is about the size of a silver dollar, Bloch said, while a backbone from Titanoboa is "the size of a large Florida grapefruit."
So far the scientists have found about 180 fossils of backbone and ribs that came from about two dozen individual snakes, and now they hope to go back to Colombia to find parts of the skull, Bloch said.
Titanoboa's size gives clues about its environment. A snake's size is related to how warm its environment is. The fossils suggest equatorial temperatures in its day were significantly warmer than they are now, during a time when the world as a whole was warmer. So equatorial temperatures apparently rose along with the global levels, in contrast to the competing hypothesis that they would not go up much, Head noted.
"It's a leap" to apply the conditions of the past to modern climate change, Head said. But given that, the finding still has "some potentially scary implications for what we're doing to the climate today," he said.
The finding suggest the equatorial regions will warm up along with the planet, he said.
"We won't have giant snakes, however, because we are removing most of their habitats by development and deforestation" in equatorial regions, he said.
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. The information contained in the AP news report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press. Active hyperlinks have been inserted by AOL.


This is pretty intresting, yeah its a fossil but this shows just how big a snake could get 'Titanoboa' was 40-45 feet long, wieghed 2,500 pounds, had a backbone as thick as a grapefruit, and could easily eat something the size of a cow...scary. I can already see the scifi movies coming.

Cool,I really find sankes facinating.

[Text edited due to inappropriate content.]

Inapproprate dude. And if your meaning what I think, that's against site rules.



So do I, they get a bad rap, they normally can't hurt you...unless they're as big as this one.

Reported!!



You have no idea....I watch sci-fi channel all the time and just in the last month I've seen ten different snake-related movies.



Or if they're poisonous.

Believe me when I say this,even the small one can be nasty(in some animals,the small are actually more dangerous).
Here is a list of some of the deadliest(and the 2 largest) snakes
green anaconda

reticulated python(not as dangerous,but is still pretty big)


Also that thing about giant members of the species is fairly possible now.(I'll explain in an upcoming topic on snakes)

Thank you. Yeah, sci-fi has a liking to giant snakes, yet rarely poisonious ones which, like you said, are the real threat to humans but only if you provoc them, leave them alone and they'll leave you alone.
Joker, you're also right.

Yep. They're overpopulating in Florida, I hear, and the big ones are just starting to come out. The story is: People got big snakes for pets, then when they got too big, releashed them into the Everglades. They're now flourishing, entering human habitat, and scientists say it would take another Ice Age to wipe them all out. There's that many.

Yay!! Somebody said I'm right(which doesn't happen often ).



I can't wait.

This reminds me of one episode of Destinaton Truth where they looked for giant snakes.

Uh, you never reported it ;] Please actually report something before you say "reported", so I shall report this item.

I did report it!!

Please don't say that I didn't because I clearly reported that person's post, so don't ya dare threaten me!

Err - It's funny that I could report it, when it's reported you cant report it again (Unless a mod closed the report). And at what point did I threaten you?

Right here.



I don't know, but I did report it so why don't ya stop assuming that I didn't? Maybe it's because of something else, like the person getting banned but I reported that post.

Now, lets get back on topic.

I don't see how Conay actually made any kind of threat... o.O He said he was going to report it himself, since it seemed like it hadn't been. Does not equate to 'I'MA KILL YOU' or anything.

*cough* anywho!

Regarding the topic... holy crap o.o I can only imagine a snake that size.. and it's pretty scary XD;; Real interesting stuff, though. I'm always intrigued by 'creatures past', especially ginormous ones... and especially ginormous predatory ones that strike fear in the hearts of millions |D Hehe.

Kind of reminds me of the megalodon as compared to modern sharks. It's so cool to imagine those guys in action millions of years ago... *shudder*

I also like Megalodon, though scarier about them is some scientists believe Megalodon still lives in deep ocean trenches. Anyway, back to our monster snake here, the strange thing is, natives in the Amazon have been reporting Anacondas the size of Titanoboa for a long time, if Titanboa was still alive down there, that would be an explaination since Titanoboa apparently was semiaquatic like Anacondas...now that's a scary thought! And did I mention, as the artical says, this thing likely fed on Crocodiles? Or at least realitives of Crocodiles, which were actueally bigger than they are today...On a realtated note, I guess Scifi Channel wasn't so far off with their movie 'Boa' afterall....