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Found in a Colombian coal mine, a vertebra from a 45-foot (14-meter) Titanoboa cerrejones dwarfs a similar bone from a 17-foot (5.2-meter) anaconda--currently the world's biggest, if not longest, snake species. (View anaconda pictures and facts.) The ancient snake's giant size suggests that mean year-round temperatures in the tropics were several degrees warmer than they are today, according to a study that analyzed the relationships among a snake's body size, its metabolism, and the outside temperature. "We were able to use the snake, if you will, as a giant fossil thermometer," said biologist Jason Head, lead author of the new...

Rainforest similar to ours flourished at 3-5° hotterFossil boffins say that dense triple-canopy rainforests, home among other things to gigantic one-tonne boa constrictors, flourished millions of years ago in temperatures 3-5°C warmer than those seen today - as hot as some of the more dire global-warming projections.The new fossil evidence comes from the Cerrejón coal mine in Colombia, previously the location where the remains of the gigantic 40-foot Titanoboa cerrejonensis were discovered. The snake's discoverers attracted flak from global-warming worriers at the time for saying that the cold-blooded creature would only have been able to survive in jungles a good...

NEW YORK — Never mind the 40-foot snake that menaced Jennifer Lopez in the 1997 movie "Anaconda." Not even Hollywood could match a new discovery from the ancient world. Fossils from northeastern Colombia reveal the biggest snake ever discovered: a behemoth that stretched 42 to 45 feet long, reaching more than 2,500 pounds. "This thing weighs more than a bison and is longer than a city bus," enthused snake expert Jack Conrad of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, who was familiar with the find. "It could easily eat something the size of a cow. A human...

After the extinction of the dinosaurs 65m years ago, new giants evolved to terrorise life on Earth: snakes as long as a bus and as wide as a door. On Thursday an international scientific team will announce in the journal Nature the discovery of Titanoboa, the largest snake that has ever lived. Its fossils were found in the Cerrejen coal mines of Colombia. Titanoboa was a constrictor like today’s boas and anacondas, preying on crocodiles and giant turtles about 60m years ago in what was then a steamy tropical rainforest. At a conservative estimate it grew 13 metres long and...

The discovery of fossilised remains belonging to the world's largest snake has been reported in Nature journal. Titanoboa was 13m (42ft) long - about the size of a London bus - and lived in the rainforest of north-east Colombia 58-60 million years ago. The snake was so wide it would have reached up to a person's hips, say researchers, and was estimated to have weighed more than a tonne. Green anacondas - the world's heaviest snakes - reach a mere 250kg (550lbs).

A 300-million-year-old forest has been found preserved by volcanic ash, just as the Roman town of Pompeii was. The remarkable discovery was made near a coal mine at the city of Wuda in China, by a University of Pennsylvania scientist and Chinese researchers. The study site is unique as it gives a snapshot of a moment in time. Because volcanic ash covered a large expanse of forest over the course of only a few days, the plants were preserved as they fell, in many cases in the exact locations where they grew. 'It's marvellously preserved,' said Hermann Pfefferkorn, a paleobotanist...

BUDAPEST (Reuters) - Hungarian scientists said on Tuesday they have discovered a group of fossilized swamp cypress trees preserved from 8 million years ago which could provide clues about the climate of pre-historic times. Instead of petrifying -- turning to stone -- the wood of 16 Taxodium trees was preserved in an open-cast coal mine allowing geologists to study samples as if they were sections cut from a piece of living wood. "The importance of the findings is that so many trees got preserved in their original position in one place," Alfred Dulai, geologist at the Hungarian Natural History Museum...

Fossil boffins say that dense triple-canopy rainforests, home among other things to gigantic one-tonne boa constrictors, flourished millions of years ago in temperatures 3-5°C warmer than those seen today - as hot as some of the more dire global-warming projections. Just like a modern jungle. Except with bloody enormous snakes. The new fossil evidence comes from the Cerrejón coal mine in Colombia, previously the location where the remains of the gigantic 40-foot Titanoboa cerrejonensis were discovered. The snake's discoverers attracted flak from global-warming worriers at the time for saying that the cold-blooded creature would only have been able to survive...

If it were still alive today, the largest snake ever known to have lived would feel right at home in South America's tropical rain forests. That's because the modern ecosystem contains many of the same plants that grew in the massive serpent's home turf some 60 million years ago, according to a new study detailing the earliest known "modern" rain forest. The study is based on more than 2,000 fossil leaves recently discovered in Colombia's Cerrejón coal mine—the same place where scientists had found fossils of Titanoboa cerrejonesis earlier this year. Many of the newfound plant fossils are of palm,...

Standing on the wind-swept flatlands of southern Vermilion County, you might think you'd have to drive the 180 miles to Chicago's Field Museum to find the nearest fossilized tree trunk from the Pennsylvania Age, 300 million years ago. Nah, just drill straight down. That's where coal miners working south and west of Georgetown have unearthed, chunk by fossilized chunk, what has revealed itself over the past few years to be the remains of a fossilized rain forest. It covers about 15 square miles, all more than 200 feet below ground, and probably is the largest intact rain forest from that...

Scientists exploring a mine have uncovered a natural Sistine chapel showing not religious paintings, but incredibly well preserved images of sprawling tree trunks and fallen leaves that once breathed life into an ancient rainforest. Replete with a diverse mix of extinct plants, the 300-million-year-old fossilized forest is revealing clues about the ecology of Earth’s first rainforests . The discovery and details of the forest are published in the May issue of the journal Geology. “We’re looking at one instance in time over a large area. It’s literally a snapshot in time of a multiple square mile area,” said study team...

Finding a fossil in a coal mine is no big deal. Coal deposits, after all, are petrified peat swamps, and peat is made from decaying plants, which leave their imprints in mud and clay as it hardens into shale stone. But it was a different thing entirely when John Nelson and Scott Elrick, geologists with the Illinois State Geological Survey, examined the Riola and Vermilion Grove coal mines in eastern Illinois. Etched into ceilings of the mine shafts is the largest intact fossil forest ever seen—at least four square miles of tropical wilderness preserved 307 million years ago. That's when an...

There’s some good coming off China’s extensive coal exploitation (the nation holds the top place for most pollutant emissions resulting from burning coal), as recent mining activities around Wuda in Inner Mongolia, China, has uncovered an almost perfectly preserved 298 million year-old forest. The forest, which also features intact trees with leaves, branches, trunk and cones, was buried by volcanic ash, and thus kept away from time’s unforgiving touch. The researchers dubbed the forest the “Pompeii of the Permian period, since the manner in which it was preserved bared a striking resemblance to the famous Roman namesake event. The volcanic...