Fossils recovered from Kutch in Gujarat may have belonged to the spine of one of the largest snakes to ever have lived, according to new research from the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee.
From the Panandhro Lignite Mine, researchers discovered 27 “mostly well-preserved” bones forming the snake’s spinal column, or vertebra, with some connections still intact. They said the vertebrae appeared to be from a fully-grown animal.
Part of the now-extinct Madtsoiidae family, the snake is estimated to be between roughly 11 and 15 metres long. The Madtsoiidae snake family is known to have lived across a broad geography, including Africa, Europe and India.
The researchers said the snake represented a “distinct lineage” originating in India which then spread via southern Europe to Africa during the Eocene, about 56 to 34 million years ago. The first ancestors and close relatives of the modern mammal species are said to have appeared in the Eocene period.
The authors dated the fossils to the Middle Eocene period roughly 47 million years ago.
The researchers have named this newly discovered snake species ‘Vasuki Indicus’ (V. Indicus) after the mythical snake round the neck of the Hindu deity Shiva and in reference to its country of discovery, India. Their findings are published in the journal Scientific Reports.
The vertebrae, measuring between 38 and 62 millimeters in length, and between 62 and 111 millimeters in width, suggested V. Indicus to possibly have had a broad, cylindrical body, the researchers said.
They extrapolated the measurements of V. Indicus to be between 10.9 and 15.2 metres in length.
This is comparable in size to the extinct Titanoboa, the longest known snake to have ever lived, the researchers said, even as they highlighted the uncertainties around these estimates. The fossils of Titanoboa were first discovered in the 2000s in present-day Colombia.
They believe that V. Indicus’s large size may have made it a slow-moving ambush predator, similar to an anaconda.
