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

Again in 2005, palaeontologists together with Sunil Bajpai on the Indian Institute of Expertise Roorkee have been looking for fossils in a coal mine in Gujarat in western India.

“We have 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 vast. Because of their massive measurement and the truth that their anatomy was considerably obscured by sediment, these have been first thought to belong to some type of extinct crocodile, says Debajit Datta, additionally on the Indian Institute of Expertise Roorkee.

After a better evaluation, Datta and Bajpai now imagine the vertebrae belonged to an exceedingly massive 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 usually 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, corresponding to a marsh or swamp, just like a lot of right now’s massive species of python.

Utilizing knowledge from modern-day snakes that compares the scale of their vertebrae with total 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 not possible to know whether or not their size and vertebrae measurement would correlate in the identical approach as dwelling species.

“Warning is all the time warranted every time you might be extrapolating past the obtainable 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.”