Fossil stays found in India have been recognized as belonging to an unlimited, 47-million-year-old extinct snake. Although just a few of the animal’s vertebrae had been recovered, researchers estimate that it may have been as much as 15 metres lengthy, placing it in rivalry for being the longest snake of all time.

Again in 2005, palaeontologists together with Sunil Bajpai on the Indian Institute of Expertise Roorkee had been trying to find fossils in a coal mine in Gujarat in western India.

“We had been really prospecting this locality for fossils of early whales,” says Bajpai, “however we discovered not simply whales however a number of different vertebrate fossils, together with these of snakes.”

Amongst these fossils was a set of 27 vertebrae measuring as much as 6 centimetres lengthy and 11 centimetres huge. On account of their giant measurement and the truth that their anatomy was considerably obscured by sediment, these had been first thought to belong to some type of extinct crocodile, says Debajit Datta, additionally on the Indian Institute of Expertise Roorkee.

After a more in-depth evaluation, Datta and Bajpai now consider the vertebrae belonged to an exceedingly giant snake from an extinct household referred to as the Madtsoiidae. Solely the extinct species Titanoboa cerrejonensis, which had barely bigger vertebrae and is estimated to have grown to a most size of between 12.8 and 14.3 metres, is of a comparable measurement.

The brand new species has been named Vasuki indicus, after Vasuki, a serpent in Hinduism that’s typically depicted curled across the neck of the god Shiva. The researchers say it’s more likely to have been an ambush predator dwelling in both a terrestrial or semi-aquatic surroundings, resembling a marsh or swamp, just like lots of immediately’s giant species of python.

Utilizing knowledge from modern-day snakes that compares the scale of their vertebrae with general size, Datta and Bajpai estimate that V. indicus was between 10.9 and 15.2 metres lengthy. Whereas that is probably longer than Titanoboa, the researchers emphasise that we don’t have full skeletons of any Madtsoiid snakes, so it’s unimaginable to know whether or not their size and vertebrae measurement would correlate in the identical method as dwelling species.

“Warning is at all times warranted each time you might be extrapolating past the accessible knowledge set,” says Jacob McCartney at Nazareth College in Rochester, New York. “However the vertebrae of this new species are so huge that they are surely second in measurement solely to these of the Colombian species Titanoboa.”