Fresh expeditions visited La Puente to search for more pieces of fossil snake. Eventually the team collected snake vertebrae from 28 different animals. Except, apparently, it was. That was Jason Head, then working at the University of Toronto. They had met in the early s when Bloch was a graduate student at the University of Michigan and Head was an undergraduate. He held up a vertebra so Head could see it. Was this a snake? They focused on the vertebrae from two different fossil snakes.
Both species are common in South America today. Boas can be up to 14 feet long and weigh as much as pounds.
Anacondas can exceed 20 feet and weigh more than pounds. And even though anacondas are big, these snakes were much bigger. How big? The problem with sizing ancient snakes is that you never have the whole spine in a neatly articulated row. You get individual bones, maybe pairs and occasionally three together. Head and Indiana University paleontologist P. David Polly for two years had been building a mathematical model of a snake spinal column based on living species.
By examining these joints, ridges and knobs, and describing individual vertebrae as sets of coordinate points on a graph, Head and Polly created a template for all snakes. The team published its first results in Nature in early , saying Titanoboa was between 42 feet and 49 feet long, with a mean weight of 2, pounds.
With Titanoboa , enormous was the rule, not the exception. Titanoboa was as long as a school bus and weighed as much as a small rhino. Aside from the boid-style vertebrae, however, that was about all that could be said about the creature at first.
The discovery last year of the Titanoboa skull was key to advancing the research. The process of assessing new bones from a fossil like Titanoboa is tedious and repetitive. Bloch and Head wanted to determine if their first analysis—that Titanoboa was more boa than anaconda—would hold up. There was at least one inconsistency, however. This primitive dinosaur had a wide W-shaped jaw and a solid bony crest resembling a humped nose.
An illustration of a Microraptor as it swallows a lizard whole during the Cretaceous period. The well-preserved fossils of the Microraptor and the lizard were both found, leading to the discovery that the lizard was a previously unknown species.
The back of a skull found in a Grecian cave has been dated to , years ago. Known as Apidima 1, right, researchers were able to scan and re-create it middle and left. The rounded shape of Apidima 1 is a unique feature of modern humans and contrasts sharply with Neanderthals and their ancestors.
A 33,year-old human skull shows evidence of being struck with a club-like object. The right side of the man's head has a large depressed fracture. It lived between 1. This jawbone belonged to a Neanderthal girl who lived , years ago. It was found in Scladina Cave in Belgium. This is an artist's illustration of the newly discovered dinosaur species Fostoria dhimbangunmal.
Radiocarbon dating has revealed that this Iron Age wooden shield was made between and BC. The incredibly well-preserved fossil of a 3 million-year-old extinct species of field mouse, found in Germany, which was less than 3 inches long, was found to have red pigment in its fur.
A mass grave dated to 5, years ago in Poland contains 15 people who were all from the same extended family. This is an artist's impression of the Ambopteryx longibrachium, one of only two dinosaurs known to have membranous wings. The dinosaur's fossilized remains were found in Liaoning, in northeast China, in Reconstruction of a small tyrannosauroid Suskityrannus hazelae from the Late Cretaceous.
Researchers have been studying Archaeopteryx fossils for years, but new X-ray data reveal that the bird-like dinosaur may have been an "active flyer. A ,year-old Denisovan jawbone found in a cave on the Tibetan Plateau is the first evidence of the presence of this ancient human group outside the Denisova Cave in Siberia. An artist's illustration of Simbakubwa kutokaafrika, a gigantic carnivore that lived 23 million years ago.
It is known from fossils of most of its jaw, portions of its skull and parts of its skeleton. It was a hyaenodont, a now-extinct group of mammalian carnivores, that was larger than a modern-day polar bear.
The right upper teeth of the newly discovered species Homo luzonensis. The teeth are smaller and more simplified than those belonging to other Homo species. The towering and battle-scarred "Scotty" is the world's largest Tyrannosaurus rex and the largest dinosaur skeleton ever found in Canada. Researchers discovered unknown species at the Qingjiang fossil site on the bank of the Danshui River, near its junction with the Qingjiang River in Hubei Province, China.
During a study of the ancient Iberian population, the remains of a man and woman buried together at a Spanish Bronze Age site called Castillejo de Bonete showed that the woman was a local and the man's most recent ancestors had come from central Europe.
Durrington Walls is a Late Neolithic henge site in Wiltshire. Pig bones recovered at the site revealed that people and livestock traveled hundreds of miles for feasting and celebration. An artist's impression of a Galleonosaurus dorisae herd on a riverbank in the Australian-Antarctic rift valley during the Early Cretaceous, million years ago. The children and llamas might have been sacrificed due to flooding. The tooth of an extinct giant ground sloth that lived in Belize 27, years ago revealed that the area was arid, rather than the jungle that it is today.
An artist's illustration of what the small tyrannosaur Moros intrepidus would have looked like 96 million years ago. These small predators would eventually become Tyrannosaurus rex. Examples of tools manufactured from monkey bones and teeth recovered from the Late Pleistocene layers of Fa-Hien Lena Cave in Sri Lanka show that early humans used sophisticated techniques to hunt monkeys and squirrels.
Two of the fossil specimens discovered in Korea had reflective eyes, a feature still apparent under light. An artist's illustration of Mnyamawamtuka moyowamkia, a long-necked titanosaur from the middle Cretaceous period recently found in Tanzania. Its tail vertebra has a unique heart shape, which contributed to its name.
In Swahili, the name translates to "animal of the Mtuka with a heart-shaped tail. The oldest evidence of mobility is 2. The tubes, discovered in black shale, are filled with pyrite crystals generated by the transformation of biological tissue by bacteria, found in layers of clay minerals.
Researchers recently studied climate change in Greenland as it happened during the time of the Vikings. By using lake sediment cores, they discovered it was actually warmer than previously believed. This is an artist's illustration of Antarctica, million years ago.
The newly discovered fossil of a dinosaur relative, Antarctanax shackletoni, revealed that reptiles lived among the diverse wildlife in Antarctica after the mass extinction.
Bone points and pierced teeth found in Denisova Cave were dated to the early Upper Paleolithic. A new study establishes the timeline of the cave, and it sheltered the first known humans as early as , years ago. This artist's illustration shows a marine reptile similar to a platypus hunting at dusk. This duckbilled animal was the first reptile to have unusually small eyes that most likely required it to use other senses, such as the tactile sense of its duckbill, to hunt for prey. Although it's hard to spot, researchers found flecks of lapis lazuli pigment, called ultramarine, in the dental plaque on the lower jaw of a medieval woman.
A Neanderthal fossil, left, and a modern human skeleton. Neanderthals have commonly be considered to show high incidences of trauma compared with modern humans, but a new study reveals that head trauma was consistent for both.
The world's oldest figurative artwork from Borneo has been dated to 40, years ago, when humans were living on what's now known as Earth's third-largest island. A ,year-old Neanderthal child's tooth contains an unprecedented record of the seasons of birth, nursing, illness and lead exposures over the first three years of its life.
An artist's illustration shows giant nocturnal elephant birds foraging in the ancient forests of Madagascar at night. A new study suggests that the now-extinct birds were nocturnal and blind. Kebara 2 is the most complete Neanderthal fossil recovered to date.
It was uncovered in Israel's Kebara Cave, where other Neanderthal remains have been found. The world's oldest intact shipwreck was found by a research team in the Black Sea. It's a Greek trading vessel that was dated to BC. The ship was surveyed and digitally mapped by two remote underwater vehicles.
This fossil represents a new piranha-like fish from the Jurassic period with sharp, pointed teeth. It probably fed on the fins of other fishes. Two small bones from the Ciemna Cave in Poland are the oldest human remains found in the country. The condition of the bones also suggests that the child was eaten by a large bird. This artist's illustration shows the newly discovered dinosaur species Ledumahadi mafube foraging in the Early Jurassic of South Africa.
ET Markets Conclave — Cryptocurrency. Reshape Tomorrow Tomorrow is different. Let's reshape it today. Corning Gorilla Glass TougherTogether. ET India Inc. ET Engage. ET Secure IT. Panache Tech and Gadgets. Panache People The study also found evidence for a second burst of snake evolution around the time the world shifted from a warm "Hothouse Earth" towards a colder climate that saw the formation of polar icecaps and the start of the Ice Ages.
Snakes have been incredibly successful on Earth and can be found on every continent except Antarctica. They live in most ecosystems, from the ocean to dry deserts.
There are snakes that live underground and those that live at the top of trees. They vary in size from a few centimetres to more than 6 metres. Snakes are critically important for the health of ecosystems, keeping prey in check and helping humans by controlling pests. Due to conflict with humans, many species are at threat of extinction.
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