Titanoboa

Epic card · No. 14203

Titanoboa (; lit. 'titanic boa') is a genus of extinct giant boid snake (being the biological family of all boas and anacondas) that lived during the middle and late Paleocene epoch. Titanoboa was first discovered in the early 2000s by members of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, which – along with students from the University of Florida – recovered 186 fossils of Titanoboa from the Cerrejón coal mines in the La Guajira department of northeastern Colombia. It was named and described in 2009 as Titanoboa cerrejonensis, and lauded as the largest snake ever found at that time. The original type material consisted of thoracic vertebrae and ribs, but later expeditions collected parts of the skull and teeth. Titanoboa is estimated to grow up to 12.8 m (42 ft) or perhaps even up to 14.3 m (47 ft) long, and weigh around 730 to 1,135 kg (1,610 to 2,500 lb). The discovery of Titanoboa cerrejonensis supplanted the previous record holder, Gigantophis garstini, which is known from the Eocene...

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