New York commuters arriving at Grand Central
Station will soon be
greeted by a monstrous sight: a 48-foot-long, 2,500-pound titanoboa snake.
The good news: It's not alive. Anymore. But the full-scale replica of the
reptile -- which will make its first appearance at the commuter hub on March 22
-- is intended, as Smithsonian spokesperson Randall Kremer happily
admitted, to "scare the daylights out of people" -- actually has a
higher calling: to "communicate science to a lot of people." The
scientifically scary-accurate model will go a long way toward that: If this
snake slithered by you, it would be waist-high and measure the length of a
school bus. Think of it as the T-rex of
snakes.
This newly discovered species, known
as titanoboa (yes, the words "titan" and "boa" are in
there), which lived 65 million years ago, is about to have its close-up. The
New York City appearance is promoting an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institute's National Museum of Natural
History in D.C.
opening on March 30, which ties in to a TV special on the Smithsonian Channel
called, what else, "Titanoboa:
Monster Snake." The two-hour program airs April 1.
Remains
of the titanoboa were first discovered in a Colombian coal mine in 2005. One of
the researchers specializing in the Paleocene era, the time after the death of the
dinosaurs, was Jonathan Bloch. A vertebrate paleontologist from University of
Florida's Museum of Natural History, the scientist led multiple expeditions,
along with Carlos Jaramillo of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. The
team collected remains from the mine, which resulted in the find. Together with ancient-snake expert Jason Head of the University of
Nebraska, they named the world's largest snake Titanoboa.
Speaking on the phone to Yahoo!
News, Bloch admitted that when the team was first collecting the skeletons of
Titanoboa, he didn't immediately understand what he had found until he returned
to the lab. With the help of his students, he was able to identify the fossils
as snakes, just much, much bigger than the ones of today. He described the
enormous vertebrae as "sort of like if you saw a mouse skull the size of
rhino skull." The predator, which is related to a boa constrictor but
actually behaved like an anaconda, lived in water and fed on fish, other
titanoboas, and crocodiles (very, very large crocodiles). If this sounds like
Hollywood's next blockbuster, Bloch noted that this time around, truth is
actually bigger than fiction: The predator from the movie "Anaconda," for one, is not as big as
titanoboa. "This is really an example where reality and the past have
exceeded the imaginations of Hollywood."
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