Sunil Bajpayee Roorkee of the Indian Institute of Technology was searching for fossils in a coal mine in the western Indian state of Gujarat.
“We were actually looking for early whale fossils at this location,” says Bajpai. “But we also discovered fossils of not only whales, but also many other vertebrates, including snakes.”
These fossils included a collection of 27 vertebrae, each measuring up to 6 centimeters long and 11 centimeters wide. Due to their large size and the fact that their anatomy was somewhat obscured by sediment, they were initially thought to belong to some type of extinct crocodile, he said. Debasit Duttaalso located at the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee.
After detailed analysis, Dutta and Vajpayee now believe the vertebrae belong to a very large snake from an extinct family called the Mazzoidae.Extinct species only Titanoboa Celejonensisthe vertebrae are slightly larger and are estimated to have grown to a maximum length of 12.8 to 14.3 meters, making them comparable in size.
The name of the new species has been decided Vasuki IndicusIt is named after Vasuki, a snake often depicted in Hinduism as wrapped around the neck of Lord Shiva. Researchers say that, like many of today's large pythons, it was likely an ambush predator that lived on land or in semi-aquatic environments such as wetlands.
Using data from modern snakes comparing vertebral size and total length, Dutta and Bajpai estimated that: V. indicus The length was 10.9-15.2 meters. Although this could potentially be longer than this, Titanoboathe researchers stress that a complete skeleton of a mazzoid snake does not exist, so it is impossible to know whether its body length and spine size correlate in the same way as in modern species.
“You always have to be careful when extrapolating beyond the available dataset,” says Jacob McCartney of Nazarene University in Rochester, New York. “But the vertebrae of this new species are very large, in fact second in size to the Columbian vertebrae.” Titanoboa”
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Source: www.newscientist.com
