Giant snake, maybe the biggest ever, discovered in prehistoric India (2024)

Around 47 million years ago, a giant snake lived in what is today India. Based on 27 remarkably preserved vertebrae found in Gujarat, this was one of the biggest snakes ever to grace our planet, according to a report Thursday in Scientific Reports – possibly as much as 15 meters (nearly 50 feet) long, and counting.

Researchers Debajit Datta and Sunil Bajpai of the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee believe the specimen they found was a full-grown adult.

Recently, other researchers reported on the discovery of another unknown but very much alive giant snake: the northern green anaconda, living in the Amazon. The longest such specimen observed and recorded to date was 8.4 meters.

The new species, Vasuki Indicus, may have been double that size. It was named for Vasuki, the mythical "king of snakes" coiled around the neck of the Hindu deity Shiva, and India.

Vasuki was reputedly devoted to Shiva, indeed having no life without the deity, and is venerated to this very day.

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The bones of the actual paleosnake were found in the Panandhro Lignite Mine in Kutch and were dated to the Middle Eocene, a warm period 47.8 million to 38 million years ago.

Like the anaconda, this snake may have appeared rather rotund. Its vertebrae measure between 6.2 and 11.1 centimeters in width, suggesting a broad, cylindrical body, Datta and Bajpai say. They believe it did not resort to the aquatic lifestyle to support its bodyweight but lived on land, or was semi-aquatic. They are however pretty sure it wasn't arboreal, on the grounds of the shape of its vertebrae and horse sense.

Large fat snakes like the anaconda are ambush hunters because speed is not their forte, and Vasuki likely employed a similar hunting strategy, the researchers posit.

Was Vasuki the biggest snake ever? Maybe. Another extinct reptile, Titanoboa, was comparable in size. Titanoboa lived in South America and estimates place it at maybe as much as 14.3 meters long, but paleontology is the art of interpreting what we find. Likely we have not found the biggest Titanoboa or Vasuki Indicus that ever lived.

The newly identified, if tragically extinct, giant snake belonged to the madtsoiidae family of snakes, which emerged 100 million years ago in the Late Cretaceous in the paleosupercontinent of Gondwana as it was breaking up. Some madtsoiidae have been found in Laurentia, but all known early-diverging groups in the madtsoiidae are from landmasses that had been part of Gondwana.

How do the researchers distinguish between their new species and other madtsoiidaes? "We determined that our specimens belonged to a new species by comparing the anatomy of the fossils with that of other extinct and present-day snakes. Our conclusion was further scrutinized by running phylogenetic analyses where the evolutionary position of Vasuki was tested with other present-day and extinct snakes," they answered via email.

If once paleontologists thought the madtsoiidae were related to boas and pythons, now they believe the family was much more basal – an earlier snake. The very earliest snakes we know of, based on the fossil record, lived in the Mesozoic Era, around 170 million years ago (or possibly even earlier – fossils from that time indicate they were already diverse).

Vasuki Indicus specifically seems to have been a distinct "relic" lineage of giant madtsoiidae that originated in India, Datta and Bajpai say. From there, its lineage spread to Europe and then to Africa about 56 to 34 million years ago. How did it achieve that? Around 55 million years ago, the Indian subcontinent began to collide with Asia, enabling the snakes to slither onward and outward, expanding their range.

Another fossil madtsoiid snake discovered in India, in Pisdura, was named Madtsoia and was calculated to have been 5 meters long. That paper points out that fossils of the madtsoiidae are actually rare in India compared with other land masses that had been part of Gondwana and most had been small.

The last known stamping grounds of the madtsoiidae were Australia and South America.

When they reigned, some madtsoiidae were small, like most snakes today, and some were enormous, like Vasuki. Some speculate that serpent gigantism was driven by the relatively high temperatures of the Middle Eocene, which averaged around 28 degrees Celsius (82 degrees Fahrenheit). However, there is no consensus on gigantism and climate. And now, perhaps to the relief of ophidiophobes, they are gone.