Posted on 04/01/2012 11:19:25 PM PDT by nickcarraway
A spring warning for puttering-in-the-garden types who have occasionally been startled by a garter snake as they pull the weeds: Soon you may be seeing a cousin of that garter lolling in your flowerbed. This snake will be fairly easy to distinguish from the other. It’ll be the one that’s longer than your house.
“Titanoboa: Monster Snake,” coming Sunday on the Smithsonian Channel, suggests near the end of the program that we may not have seen the last of the incredibly large prehistoric serpent known as Titanoboa, or something like it. The program notes the correlation between snake size and temperature. In Britain, with a relatively mild climate, the biggest snake is about six feet long, while in the modern-day Amazon basin, anacondas might reach 25 feet. Throw in a little global warming, and suddenly those 25-footers could be runts.
Titanoboa, you see, was 48 feet long. People strolling through Grand Central Terminal the other day got a first-hand look at just how big that is, because the Smithsonian Channel had plunked a life-size model of the snake there as a promotional device. In the program, there’s a scene in which four researchers are struggling to hold onto an annoyed green anaconda in the wetlands of Venezuela that looks to be about 20 feet long.
“This is probably the size of a juvenile Titanoboa, maybe about a year old,” says Jonathan I. Bloch, one of those researchers. Oh.
Though the prospect of a Titanoboa-filled future makes for a delightful image to pass on to your grandchildren, the most interesting part of the program is the story of the discovery of the first Titanoboa fossils at a coal mine in Colombia and the dawning realization of just how big the snake was.
(Excerpt) Read more at tv.nytimes.com ...
http://www.mosquito.cl/wp-content/uploads/amazonia-anaconda.jpg
The second pic is an allegedly fake picture of a huge snake swimming in the Amazon. Fake because a different picture shows a much 'smaller' (but still large) snake. Using the forest canopy as a measurement the snake in that picture would have to be hundreds of feet long.
Easy. Put a burka on it and it will get right through security.:-)
ROFL!!! VERY good!
Now we know what finally got the dinosaurs ....
You mean it wasn't Bush's fault?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.