A University of Cambridge-led team has reconstructed ancient anacondas from 12.4-million-year-old fossils discovered in Venezuela, to find these tropical snakes were a whopping 5.2 metres long.
Global changes have since driven many other giant animals to extinction, but anacondas grow just as big today.
Many animal species that lived 12.4 to 5.3 million years ago, in the period known as the ‘Middle to Upper Miocene’, were much bigger than their modern relatives due to warmer global temperatures, extensive wetlands and an abundance of food.
While other Miocene giants – like the 12-metre caiman (Purussaurus) and the 3.2-metre giant freshwater turtle (Stupendemys) – have since gone extinct, anacondas (Eunectes) bucked the trend by surviving as a giant species.
The team measured 183 fossilised anaconda backbones, representing at least 32 snakes, discovered in Falcón State in Venezuela, South America.
Combining these measurements with fossil data from other sites in South America allowed them to calculate that ancient anacondas would have been four to five metres long. This matches the size of anacondas that exist today.
Anacondas live in swamps, marshes, and big rivers like the Amazon. In the Miocene the whole of northern South America resembled today’s Amazonian region, and anacondas were much more widespread than they are today. But there is still enough of the right habitat, with the right food like capybaras and fish around, to allow modern anacondas to keep being big.
It was previously thought that anacondas must have been even bigger in the past when it was warmer, because snakes are particularly sensitive to temperature.
Alfonso-Rojas said: “This is a surprising result because we expected to find the ancient anacondas were seven or eight metres long. But we don’t have any evidence of a larger snake from the Miocene when global temperatures were warmer.”
Before this study it wasn’t clear when anacondas evolved to be so big because of a lack of fossil evidence. These snakes can have more than 300 vertebrae in their backbones, and measurements of the size of individual fossilised vertebrae can provide a reliable indication of how long a snake was.
