Fossils of a snake up to 15 meters long discovered in India

April 19 () –

A new ancient species of snake called Vasuki Indicus, which lived 47 million years ago in India, It may have been one of the largest that has ever existed.

The new species which reached an estimated length of between 11 and 15 meterswas part of the now-extinct snake family Madtsoiidae, but represented a distinct lineage that originated in India, according to new research published in Scientific Reports

Debajit Datta and Sunil Bajpai of the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee describe a new specimen recovered from a lignite mine in the state of Gujarat, dating to the middle Eocene period.

The new species is named Vasuki Indicus in honor of the mythical snake that hangs from the neck of the Hindu deity Shiva and in reference to its country of discovery. The authors describe 27 mostly well-preserved vertebrae, some of them articulated, that look like they belong to an adult animal.

The vertebrae measure between 37.5 and 62.7 millimeters long and 62.4 and 111.4 millimeters wide, suggesting a wide, cylindrical body. Extrapolating from this, the authors estimate that V. Indicus may have reached between 10.9 and 15.2 meters in length. It is comparable in size to the longest snake that has ever existed, the extinct Titanoboa, although the authors highlight the uncertainty around these estimates.

Additionally, they speculate that the large size of V. indicus made it a slow-moving ambush predator similar to an anaconda.

The authors identify V. Indicus as belonging to the family madtsoiidae, which existed for about 100 million years from the Late Cretaceous to the Late Pleistocene and lived in a wide geographical range that included Africa, Europe and India.

They suggest that V. indicus represents a lineage of large madtsoiids that originated in the Indian subcontinent and spread across southern Europe to Africa during the Eocene, approximately 56 to 34 million years ago.