Thursday, February 5, 2009

Snakes...why did it have to be sna-- HOLY CRAP!!!

So if a tomb full of little snakes could make Indiana Jones all sweaty and shaky, I think it's safe to say that the recent discovery of titanoboa cerrejonensis in what was once a rainforest of Colombia would make our fedora-clad hero melt faster than the Nazis at the end of Raiders.

Yes, the now-extinct super snake was roughly the length of an RV, as thick as a garbage can, and ate alligators whole. I don't know about you, but the idea of a 42-foot long, 3-foot thick snake capable of swallowing a cow makes me think of something you would see in a Ray Harryhausen movie. However, paleoreptilologists (or as real people who don't make up words call them, paleontologists) have found the 5-inch wide vertebra of titanoboa, proving that this scaly beastie roamed...er...slithered across the land some 20 to 60 million years ago or, as Sarah Palin and the three former Republican candidates for President who don't believe in evolution would call it, last Thursday.

It's times like this that science proves once again that it is so freaking cool! And now it's only a matter of time before there's a Saturday evening movie on the Sci-Fi channel with titanoboa squaring off against T-Rex with a group of unlucky campers caught in the middle. Must See TV!

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