19 Years After Its Discovery, a Fossil Challenges Titanoboa as the Biggest Snake

In February two thousand nine, the journal Nature published a number: twelve point eight two metres. That was the estimated length of Titanoboa cerrejonensis, a snake from a Colombian coal mine, and it became the benchmark for the largest snake known to science. Fifteen years later, a second set of fossil bones, dug from a lignite mine in Gujarat, India, produced an estimate that lands almost in the same place. Eleven to fifteen metres. Different continent, different family, different epoch.