BY AMY BALTODANO
Hays Post

A new exhibit has slithered into the Sternberg Museum of Natural History — Titanoboa. This monstrous snake exhibit is on a 15-city national tour and will be at Sternberg through early August.

“This is the biggest snake that we know of that has been found,” said Education and Outreach Director David Levering. “The calculated estimate based on the fossils is 48 feet and 2,500 pounds.”

The fossils, which date back 60 million years, were found in what is currently a Columbian coal mine.

“The area that this snake lived in was a very wet area, with many rivers, streams and lakes,” Levering said.

At the time there were 40 foot crocodiles living in the same environment, and Titanboa was eating smaller, blunt-nosed crocodiles. 

The discovery began close to eight years ago, when researchers first began digging out the fossils. At first, these fossils were misidentified.

“The vertebrae was first identified as crocodile. No one was looking for a snake this big,” Levering said. “They were finding these giant vertebrae — they looked reptilian, so they just got wrapped up very lovingly, placed in a box and were labeled ‘crocodile.’ And some graduate students at the University of Florida, one of them was looking at it (and said). ‘It does not look quite right. This does not look like crocodile vertebrae.’ ”

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As museum goers walk through the exhibit, there is a video that details and shows how researchers corrected their mistake and how Titanboa has become the exhibit it is today.

According to Levering, the documentary also explains “about the science behind how they figure out how big it was and the environment that it was out of, the plants they were finding in the same environment and how they are basically early relatives of typical tropical plants we have today.”

After finding the first vertebrae, students reached out to David Polly, a paleontologist from Bloomington, Ind.

Levering said “he wrote a program to match the shape of one of these vertebrae to the shape of vertebrae of living snakes. It took him a year to do it.”

The exhibit also contains a live 6-foot-long boa across from Titanoboa — and the extreme difference between the two is impossible to ignore.

“These are the first specimens they are finding of this thing,” Levering said. “There is nothing to say there are not larger ones, yet to be found.”

For more information on the exhibit or other museum programs, visit sternberg.fhsu.edu.