Hold onto Your Toddlers! Giant Snake Fossil Discovered in South America

Shannon LC Cate — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 16:33:00 GMT

I was a stereotype when I was five. I had an undying fascination with all things dinosaur. I forced my parents to read me books with complicated species names like Eustreptospondylus and Piatnitzkysaurus. I was an avid fan of Land of the Lost and dreamed of someone finding a real, live dinosaur, somehow left over from prehistoric days.

It wasn't until Jurassic Park came along well into my adulthood that I realized how very unpleasant an encounter with a real, live dinosaur would, of course, probably be. But not until this morning did it occur to me that if there were once giant lizards, and later giant tigers and wool-covered elephants, well, weren't there probably giant, um, snakes? Oh yes indeed, it seems there were.

The largest prehistoric snake fossil ever found was found this week in Columbia. Measuring approximately 42 feet long and weighing in at over 500 pounds, the newly dubbed "titan boa" lived in ancient rain forests hotter than they are now by at least 5 degrees Fahrenheit. They estimate the heat by the snake's size, supposing that a cold-blooded animal needed more heat than we have now to get so much bigger than the snakes we see now. Scientists, ever-eager to toss us mortals material our tiny minds can grasp, point out that this fossil snake is larger than the animatronic snake that tried to eat Jennifer Lopez in the film "Anaconda."

So the next time your kids are dancing with Barney, remind them that these days, dinosaurs are just pretend. And that's a very good thing!

More Creature Features:

Toddler Attacked by 300 lb Snake

Rare Baby Gorilla Born

Little White Whales Going, Going...Gone?

Penguins March to Extinction

National Zoo Inseminates Panda

Image: animalreview.wordpress.com

My Anaconda Don't Want None And Neither Do I

makeitadouble — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 19:15:00 GMT

In light of the recent and tragic tiger attack at the San Francisco zoo that claimed the life of 17-year-old Carlos Sousa Jr. and seriously wounded two other young men I am aghast at how the birth of 14 baby anacondas at the New England Aquarium in Boston on News Year’s Day is being treated as a light-hearted slow news day cutesy-wootsy human interest story and not the inevitable threat to zoologists, cage cleaners, zoo patrons and most importantly our children that it really is.

On January 1 at 5 a.m. Ashley, the aquarium’s 16-foot anaconda gave girth to 14 baby anaconda’s each measuring about 2 feet in length and each possessing the same innate ability to kill their prey by coiling their large, powerful bodies around their victims and squeezing until the victim suffocates or is crushed to death. Scott Dowd, the aquarium's Amazon biologist and researcher, said "We knew that the due date was just about now. The big thing that we're all getting a kick out of is that my wife was due right around this time." The father of the snakes is the only male anaconda in the exhibit. The father of Scott Dowd’s child is not the only male anaconda in the exhibit.

Lest you think that I’m writing this to be controversial or just to use the word “lest” in a post, remember this: zoos and aquariums are merely minimum security prisons for mammals, fish, birds, reptiles, amphibians, insects, and arthropods with the sole purpose of exploiting these animals for the entertainment of humans. And what do human prisoners do besides collect rocks in the yard to be polished into chess pieces, lift weights, and make garbage bags of Pruno, a prison wine created from fruit, sugar and ketchup? They try to escape.

So, why would animal prisoners be any different? The problem is that when a human prisoner escapes he stops by Fox Studios to pick up his paycheck, steals a car then immediately goes to his shorty’s crib where the police are waiting to break in their new stun guns. When wild animals escape the zoo they don’t take the Metro-North Railroad to Connecticut, they attack and sometimes kill people.

On a rainy day during a vacation on Cape Cod a couple years back we reluctantly took our son to something called a Zoo-quarium. While he was feeding a handful of dried corn to one of the sheep, it bit his finger. Let me say that again – THE SHEEP TRIED TO EAT MY SON. For a year after that he would randomly blurt out, “White sheep bit my finger.” and we had to change the channel if a commercial for Serta Mattresses came on. What if it wasn’t a sheep he was feeding grain to though? What if it was a crocodile or a sting ray?

I say we follow the model established by DreamWorks Animation with their film Madagascar and put all the animals in captivity (this includes you too Petting Zoos, Carnivals and Siegfried and Roy) in wooden crates, load them on cargo ships and send them back to their natural environments; starting with these anacondas.

Does anyone have Sir Mix-A-Lot’s home address?

Strollerderby : anaconda

Hold onto Your Toddlers! Giant Snake Fossil Discovered in South America

Little White Whales Going, Going...Gone?

My Anaconda Don't Want None And Neither Do I