Washington— An ancient giant snake India it may have been longer than a school bus and weighing more than a ton, investigators reported Thursday.
Fossils found near a coal mine revealed the existence of a snake that was estimated to reach between 36 feet and 50 feet in length. It is comparable to the longest known snake, about 42 feet long, that once lived in what is now Colombia.
The longest snake alive today is the Asian reticulated python, which measures 33 feet.
The newly discovered colossus lived 57 million years ago in the swampy evergreen forests of western India. It may have weighed up to 2,200 pounds, researchers said in the journal Scientific Reports.
They gave it the name Vasuki indicus in honor of “the mythical snake king Vasuki, coiled around the neck of the Hindu deity Shiva,” said Debajit Datta, of the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee and co-author of the study.
The huge snake was not especially skilled at attacking.
“Considering its large size, Vasuki was a slow ambush predator that subdued its prey by constriction,” Datta said in an email.
In 2005, study co-author Sunil Bajpai of the same institute discovered fragments of the snake's spine near Kutch, Gujarat, in western India. The researchers compared more than 20 fossil vertebrae with the skeletons of living snakes to calculate their size.
Although it is not known exactly what Vasuki ate, other fossils found in the surrounding area reveal that the snake lived in swampy areas along with catfish, turtles, crocodiles and primitive whales, which may have been its prey, Datta said.