Giant 50-Foot Snake Found in India. Upside: It’s Extinct.

If you, like Indiana Jones, have a thing about snakes, add western India alongside the Amazon basin on the list of places you don’t want to go. Of course, we’re talking about the western India of about 47 million years ago, where a snake around 50 feet long and weighing in at nearly a ton lived in the forests and rivers. That weight, of course, is an estimate, as at the time the snake lived, there were no scales suitable for measuring it. Happily for us humans, it’s now extinct.

Fossilized vertebrae found near a coal mine in western India indicate that the snake was between 36 feet and 50 feet long. 

This is up to eight feet longer than the largest snake known to man and nearly 17 feet longer than the current largest living snake, the Associated Press reported this week. 

The snake weighed up to a ton, researchers said in a Scientific Reports article published on April 18. 

The giant reptile is believed to have roamed — or rather, slithered on — the Earth about 47 million years ago.

Researchers who found the snake dubbed it “Vasuki indicus,” the AP said.

For the record, that’s twice the size of the biggest snake currently living, the anaconda, which can be found today in the aforementioned Amazon basin.

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Vasuki indicus takes the biggest (and most horrifying) snake title away from the infamous Titanoboa, which is thought to have grown up to 42 feet. Both are thought to have been constrictors, like the modern-day anaconda, pythons, and boas. This, however, was a snake that could squeeze and swallow a sheep – or a human – with little effort.

Fortunately, the newly discovered monster snake is thought by natural hisstorians to have been a slow-moving ambush predator, not a more energetic, viper-active creature. It’s just as well that these things didn’t survive into the modern era; even if one could escape the coils of a snake like this, the experience would probably leave one with aches and pains that couldn’t be handled with a mere asp-irin. Stealth is no defense against a giant snake like this either; you can’t fool a giant snake, after all, because they don’t have legs to pull. At least modern humans would have weapons to deal with such a threat. Against a slow-moving giant snake, even a boa and arrow would give a human an advantage.

Rumor has it that, in the course of a natural history briefing, the extinct snake was described to a certain congresswoman and former bartender from the Bronx (who out of politeness will remain nameless). She immediately expressed her skepticism. “Snakes can’t be 50 feet long,” the congresswoman said, “… because snakes don’t have feet.”

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