New York commuters
arriving at Grand Central Station were
greeted by a monstrous sight: a 48-foot-long, 2,500-pound titanoboa snake.
The good news:
It's not alive. Anymore. But the full-scale replica of the reptile -- which was
unveiled at the commuter hub on March 22 -- is intended, as Smithsonian
spokesperson Randall Kremer joked, to "scare the daylights out of
people" -- actually has a higher calling: to "communicate science to
a lot of people." The scientifically scary-accurate model will go a long
way toward that: If this snake slithered by you, it would be waist-high and
measure the length of a school bus. Think of it as the T-rex of snakes.
This newly
discovered species, known as titanoboa
(yes, the words "titan" and "boa" are in there),
which lived 65 million years ago, is about to have its close-up. The New York
City appearance is promoting an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution's National
Museum of Natural History in D.C. opening on March 30, which ties in to a TV
special on the Smithsonian Channel called, what else, "Titanoboa: Monster
Snake." The two-hour program airs April 1.
Bloch admitted
that when the team was first collecting the skeletons of Titanoboa, he didn't
immediately understand what he had found until he returned to the lab. With the
help of his students, he was able to identify the fossils as snakes, just much,
much bigger than the ones of today. He described the enormous vertebrae as
"sort of like if you saw a mouse skull the size of rhino skull."
The predator,
which is related to a boa constrictor but actually behaved like an anaconda,
lived in water and fed on fish, other titanoboas, and crocodiles (very, very
large crocodiles).
If this sounds
like Hollywood's next blockbuster, Bloch noted that this time around, truth is
actually bigger than fiction: The predator from the movie "Anaconda,"
for one, is not as big as titanoboa. "This is really an example where
reality and the past have exceeded the imaginations of Hollywood."
0 comments:
Post a Comment