Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about biodiversity and the hidden quirks of the natural world. Most boas, which are a type of large, non-venomous ...

Bloch laughed. “I don’t think so.” Eventually they agreed that Titanoboa ’s skull was different from that of other boas, but they couldn’t determine if the extinct animal was more closely related to a ...

In a groundbreaking paleontological discovery, scientists have uncovered fossil remains of a prehistoric snake that challenges everything we know about reptilian evolution. Called Titanoboa ...

A mechanical constraint prevented the Titanoboa from lifting more than 1/5 of its body to strike. Counter-intuitively, the world’s largest apex predator was unearthed deep within the Cerrejón coal ...

Beneath the surface of a Colombian coal mine, scientists made a discovery so extraordinary that it rewrote what we know about giant reptiles. In 2009, researchers unearthed fossil remains of an ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about biodiversity and the hidden quirks of the natural world. In the humid swamps of what is now Colombia, there was once ...

Imagine a snake so massive it would have to squeeze through your office door to get at you. That was Titanoboa, the largest snake that ever slithered across our planet. Discovered in a Colombian coal ...

Paleontologists have discovered fossil remains of the world’s biggest snake, which was 13 meters long (over twice as big as this giant anaconda, pictured). Though they lived 60 million years ago, such ...

A fossil of a brand new species of ancient snake has been uncovered in India, and it may have been one of the largest snakes to have ever existed. In comparison, the largest modern-day snakes are the ...

The snake skull embraced by the Cerrejón shale mudstone was a piece of Titanoboa that Bloch, Head and their colleagues had been hoping to find for years. “It offers a whole new set of characteristics, ...