At 33 feet (10 meters), the Asiatic reticulated python is the largest snake alive today. The recently found behemoth was living in the marshy evergreen woods of western India 47 million years ago. Its weight may have reached 2,200 pounds (1,000 kg), according to research published in the journal Scientific Reports.
The name Vasuki was chosen for “the mythical snake king Vasuki, who wraps around the neck of the Hindu deity Shiva,” according to Debajit Datta, an Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee study co-author. This monstrous snake didn’t attack very quickly.
“Considering its large size, Vasuki was a slow-moving ambush predator that would subdue its prey through constriction,” Datta wrote in his email.
Although the specific diet of Vasuki is unknown, other fossils discovered in the vicinity show that the snake coexisted with prehistoric whales, catfish, turtles, crocodiles, and other wetland creatures, which may have been its food source, according to Datta.
Titanoboa, the other extinct enormous snake, was found in Colombia and is thought to have existed 60 million years ago.One thing that these two enormous snakes have in common, according to paleontologist Jason Head of Cambridge University who was not involved in the research, is that they both lived at times when the world was unusually warm. “These snakes are giant cold-blooded animals,” he stated. “Higher temperatures are necessary for a snake to grow into large sizes.”
Does this imply that snakes the size of monsters will return as a result of global warming?
Theoretically, that could work. However, he stated that the current rate of climate warming prevents snakes from evolving into enormous species.
[With AP inputs]
