Check out ‘the biggest snake ever known to exist’
Aug 22, 2015, 11:36 PM | Updated: Aug 23, 2015, 6:34 am
Seattle's Burke Museum puts the largest snake ever to have slithered the earth on display. In this file photo, a full-scale replica of "Titanoboa" swallows a crocodile. (AP)
(AP)
It ranks as the largest of its kind to ever slither across the earth. Its descendants, today, are mere fragments of its awesome presence.
Can you handle Titanoboa?
What sounds like the feature character of the next SyFy channel B-movie spectacle is actually a new exhibit debuting in Seattle.
The Burke Museum at the University of Washington is hosting “Titanoboa,” focused on an ancient killer snake. But this is not just any killer snake. This is a “slithery monarch of unbelievable size,” according to a special produced for the Smithsonian Channel.
But you better believe it .The snake was reconstructed from a 60-million-year-old skeleton discovered in a Colombian coal mine.
“It’s the biggest of its kind, ever to have lived,” the Smithsonian notes.
It was so massive, that press photos of the giant snake barely fit into the above frame for this story.
“This mighty predator dominated and disappeared. Now science is bringing it back,” the video exclaims.
It’s 48 feet long and would have weighed 2,500 pounds. It was big enough to crush and devour a crocodile. Not to mention, possibly, a T-Rex as another Smithsonian video explains.
The giant snake is believed to have lived in the Paleocene era; a time following the fall of the dinosaurs.
The Burke Museum has the full-scale replica of the snake, and it’s flanked by over-the-top Smithsonian videos with ominous music, and prehistoric fight simulations showing the snake strangling a Megalodon.
A video of the pains searchers had to take to find all the fossils of Titanoboa will be on display. Visitors can also see a 17-foot green anaconda and learn about the snakes slithering about the Northwest.
MyNorthwest’s Richard D. Oxley contributed to this article.
