Titanoboa vs Anaconda: A Battle of Titans
The colossal size of Titanoboa is believed to be closely related to the Paleocene climate. Snakes are cold-blooded animals, and their metabolic rate is influenced by environmental temperature. To maintain normal growth rates, snakes need to maintain an appropriate thermal energy, and for Titanoboa to reach such sizes, it would have required an extremely warm environment. The coal at Cerrejon mine, where Titanoboa fossils were found, was formed from layers of sediment from an ancient swamp, located along the edge of a shallow sea, now at the foothills of the Andes. This swamp environment had similar components to swamps in the Mississippi Delta or the Everglades in North America, but it was in a tropical region during a time when the Earth's climate was particularly warm.
Titanoboa is believed to be closely related to the Anaconda and shares a similar shape with today's Anaconda. It also spent most of its time in water, as evidenced by the sedimentary structures of the rocks at the Cerrejon coal mine, which contain many aquatic organisms such as mangroves, crocodiles, turtles, and fish preserved as fossils in the strata. Titanoboa may have also had ambush hunting behavior like the Anaconda, but there is a hypothesis that Titanoboa could swiftly immobilize prey with a lightning-fast bite without the need to constrict it to death like the Anaconda. When fully opened, the mouth of Titanoboa could reach up to 1.8 meters wide, with a bite force of about 400 psi (28 kg/cm2). The small, sharp, backward-curved teeth in the upper and lower jaws would make it difficult for prey to escape once caught.
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