Titanoboa: Monster Snake

From a fossil bed deep within Colombia’s Cerrejón coal mine emerges Titanoboa, the largest snake ever found. This Paleocene reptile—from the epoch following the dinosaurs’ demise—stretches our concept of what a snake can be. At 48 feet, this mega snake was longer than a school bus and was at the top of the monster-eat-monster food chain.

Organized by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service in collaboration with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, the Smithsonian Channel, the Florida Museum of Natural History, and the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Titanoboa: Monster Snake features a life-size—and incredibly life-like—model of the prehistoric creature as it swallows a crocodile whole. Featuring compelling text and video, the exhibition is an amazing look at a lost world and the incredible animals that inhabited it.

Until 2004, no one knew what lived in the South American tropics during the Paleocene epoch (65.5 to 56 million years ago). Then a student on a research expedition uncovered something remarkable, the first glimpse of a long-forgotten group of animals, with Titanoboa among them—a 60 million-year-old-beast that was able to crush and devour massive prehistoric crocodiles. What conditions nurtured such a creature? Could those conditions—and snakes of this enormous size ever return?

For the team of paleontologists, finding Titanoboa was a once-in-a-lifetime discovery. This reptile, along with other significant fossils unearthed in the Cerrejón coal mine, provide the first glimpse of the earliest known rainforest.

Titanoboa: Monster Snake Press Release