This article will take you on a journey through time and space spanning 70 million years to discover the true face of the ancient giant snake.
<h1>Dancing with Dragons: Cretaceous giant serpents</h1>
Today, the world's longest and heaviest snakes belong to the anacondae, which are divided into old world pythons such as reticulated pythons, Burmese pythons, African rock pythons, amethyst pythons, and new world aphids such as green water nymphs and red-tailed grasshoppers. Pythons are also one of the oldest of the snakes, dating back to at least the late Cretaceous dinosaur era.
Even by today's standards, pythons in the age of dinosaurs were not very large, but there were some larger ancient snakes at that time, that is, the giant snake family. Fossils have been found in Africa, South America, Australia, India and Madagascar, which split off from the Gondwana ancient land.
Typically represented in the Cretaceous giant snake family is the Madsunna snake, some of which are estimated to be up to 6 meters long. Most of the fossils found so far are incomplete, but enough to reveal an important difference between giant snakes and pythons: they have not yet fully developed the "devourer" skill.
Pythons can swallow their prey in its entirety because their upper and lower jaws are joined together by a moving square bone, allowing them to open their mouths at a wide angle. Giant snakes did not have square bones in their mouths, so they could only eat smaller prey relative to their size, such as various small dinosaurs, juvenile dragons, birds and mammals at that time. Some fossils found in India show that the 3.5-meter-long Indian ancient slit snake could not swallow the entire dinosaur egg, but could only lurk around the dinosaur's lair, waiting for the small dinosaur to break out of its shell before performing strangulation skills on it.
In the shallow seas of the Cretaceous Period, there lived a prehistoric giant snake called the ancient cup snake, and the large ones were also 5-6 meters long. They had a swimming spine and tail, and probably fed on fish, but they should not have the deadly fangs of today's sea snakes.
When dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago, giant snakes and crocodiles became one of the few large animals that survived, and hunger tolerance may have been crucial — unlike the hot-blooded foodies of dinosaurs, who didn't need to eat regularly, and it didn't matter if they were hungry for months. The Madsunna snake in South America and the ancient cup snake in Africa lived until the Eocene more than 40 million years ago, and even evolved longer and thicker species. However, the name of the first giant snake in history is not yet their turn.
Giant Serpent of the Flood: Titan Python
As the protagonist of the monster horror film, Monty Python has impressed the audience in the series "Plague of The Python". The Amazon rainforest does live in the world's heaviest and most ferocious python, the green water nymph, but its true length is probably not as large as the legend says, and the reliable record is only 5-6 meters. In the Paleocene, shortly after the "just" extinction of the dinosaurs, there was a prehistoric snake in South America that far exceeded this size.
The fossil of this giant snake was only officially named in 2009 and was named the Serejon Titan Python after its discovery in the Serrejon coal mine in Colombia. According to the 28 fossilized individuals that have been found, the researchers believe that the titan python should be between 12.6 meters and 14.9 meters (42-49 feet), equivalent to a bus; the head alone is more than 60 centimeters long, and the thickest part of the body can reach 1 meter (the water snake waist becomes the bucket waist); and the weight can exceed 1135 kg (2500 pounds). They are the largest snakes in history known to man and the largest animal on land in the world in the first 10 million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Studies show that 60 million years ago, northern South America was a rain forest swamp that was hotter and humid than the Amazon plains are today, with temperatures 3-4 degrees Celsius, precipitation nearly double, and oxygen and carbon dioxide levels in the air higher than in the 21st century. In this vibrant place, crocodiles more than 3 meters long, lungfish more than 2 meters long and giant water turtles swim through it. However, compared with the giant Titan python, they are all vulnerable to many features on the fossils of weak dwarfs, indicating that the Titan python belongs to the python family rather than the giant snake family, and is closely related to today's American treehopper, but their living habits may be more like green water nymphs, living in water most of the time. With the cover of water, their huge bodies become light and dexterous, and they can come and go as they please, hiding in the shadows.
Since there were almost no large mammals in South America weighing more than 100 kilograms at the time, the researchers believe that titan pythons are likely to feed on crocodiles. Although crocodiles are covered in thick armor, just like green waterhoppers prey on caimans today, titan pythons can still perform "death entanglements", causing their internal organs to be squeezed and unable to breathe, and suffocate after a few minutes or more.
<h1>Elephant-Devouring Snake: African Python</h1>
In the Eocene 40 million years ago, the Earth was still in a warm and humid period, the Mediterranean Sea had not yet been closed, and the North African Sahara was a tropical rainforest. The "Valley of the Whales", deep in the Egyptian desert at that time, was an important evolutionary center for elephants and whales, and it also lived a giant snake, the African python (Gigantophisgarstini).
African pythons are members of the family Macrocephalus, and only a small number of vertebrae fossils have been found in Egypt and Algeria, resulting in an estimated body length of 9.3-10.7 meters and a weight of nearly half a tonne. Before the titan python was discovered, the laurel crown of the "first snake in history" was worn on their heads (although it took many years to discover that the records of giant snakes more than 10 meters in modern times are actually not credible).
In ancient Chinese mythology, there was once a kind of "ba snake" that swallowed elephants for food and digested them in three years, and later generations used "greedy enough snakes to swallow elephants" to satirize those who were greedy. However, researchers believe that African pythons may really have the ability to "swallow elephants" - but not several tons of giant elephants, but the primitive elephants that lived at that time, Archaeopteryx and ancient mastodons.
Although according to the restoration, the adult archaeopteryx is nearly 3 meters long and weighs more than 200 kilograms, and the ancient mastodon is a giant beast with a shoulder height of nearly 2 meters, which is still too big even for African pythons. However, the cubs of these ancient elephants are much smaller, and they do not have the high intelligence and strict group of modern elephants, so it should not be so difficult to start stupidly and alone. At that time, there were still no large carnivorous mammals in Africa, and African pythons could be firmly at the top of the local food chain.
In fact, Archaeopteryx is no longer considered to be the earliest ancestor of elephants, their body structure is more specialized, more likely to be a side branch of the early elephants that evolved in the direction of aquatic evolution, and the ancient mastodon is the backbone of the evolution of elephants. Moreover, the Latin name of archaeopteryx does not mean "archaeopteryx", but is named "the beast of Lake Morris" after the place where the fossil was found.
Rainbow Snake: Australian giant snake
From the late Eocene onwards, the global climate tended to be dry and cold, closer to today's climate. Giant snakes also declined during the great reshuffle of species during this period, disappearing from most of the region, and only Australia, which drifted north to the equator, continued to carry this ancient family.
Tens of millions of years later, one of the humans ascended to The Land of Australia and became one of the oldest ethnic groups among the 7 billion humans today. Perhaps due to the increasingly arid environment, Australian Aboriginal people especially worship rain and rainbows, and create a sacred totem based on rainbows - rainbow snakes. In their mythology, the rainbow snakes are elves from ancient times, the creators of all things in the world, in charge of the wind and rain rivers and lakes and various life.
The celestial snake is named after the ancestral rainbow snake worshipped by the aborigines of northeast Australia, and its fossils were found in the 1990s of the last century, and the survival age was about 25-20 million years ago, that is, the Transition of the Cenozoic from the Paleogene to the Neogene (formerly known as the Early and Late Tertiary).
The sky snake can grow to about 6 meters long and 20-30 cm thick, which is equivalent to a larger green water nymph. Their skull structure is closer to today's Australian sand monitor lizards than the small insectivore lizards, meaning that the ancestors of snakes may have come from this branch of monitor lizards.
Another type that has to be mentioned is the Wanabee snake that lived in southern Australia during the Ice Age, which may have met with the earliest Australian human ancestors and had a body length of 5-6 meters. The name of the Wonabee snake comes from the rainbow snake in the central australian inland, it is the oldest and most ferocious rainbow snake in the legend (comparable to the ancient dragon "Deathwing" in the warcraft), perched in the depths of the earth under the famous red rock "Uluru", who if they soil the spring water will be punished by its scientists speculate that the real Wanabee snake was once ambushed near the precious water source in the Australian outback, waiting for the opportunity to sneak up on kangaroos and other marsupials that came to drink water, and may also harm human children. The taboo in Australian outback Aboriginal cultures that prevents children from going to the water's edge alone may stem from this age-old threat.
However, it was the giant snake that really suffered the catastrophe. About 50,000 years ago, the Wanabee snake and all of Australia's large animals weighing more than 100 kilograms disappeared one after another, and it is not yet possible to say whether humans are fully responsible for this. The only thing that is certain is that the blood of the giant snake family that has survived for 70 million years has been cut off, and the human reverence for the great snake is still far from over.