Titanoboa Lives! (Possibly)

[paigetheoracle]

The discovery of Titanoboa and other unknown creatures from that epoch, makes me wonder if it might have survived until recently. Think of folklore's dragon mythology and the fact that they were also called 'worms' (great snakes?). Then there is The Ohio Indian snake mounds - could these have been meant to be life size? Most compelling of all was a film, featured in Arthur C Clarke's Mysterious World, in the sixties, that showed a gigantic snake rearing up at the helicopter that was filming it and easily three to four times its length and half its girth (Africa if my memory serves me right): This was before CGI remember. Maybe giant crocodiles from this same era, could explain other dragon tales?

 

Also sea 'serpents' - could these be like sea snakes, versions of Titanoboa that adapted to a different lifestyle?

 

In The UK's Fortean Times of last year was an edition about giant spider tales, including one story of a Rhodesian farmer (Africa again, note) who claimed to regularly see a gigantic spider cross his path: Could legends of vampires actually be surviving members of an unknown breed of giant arachnid, that attacked people at night, sucking the life out of them and leaving two distinct puncture wounds?

 

Lastly, the tales of pterodactyls or 'big birds' in the American West, could they too be surviving relics from a bygone era?

 

In conclusion maybe this would explain humanities fear of snakes, spiders and birds as not unreasonable and possibly based on something other than the small varieties we see nowadays?

[CraigD]

Hey, Paige – good to see you back! :) It’s been a while.

 

The discovery of Titanoboa and other unknown creatures from that epoch, makes me wonder if it might have survived until recently. Think of folklore's dragon mythology and the fact that they were also called 'worms' (great snakes?).

I believe the fossil shows pretty clearly that Titanoboa disappeared around 58,000,000 years ago, along with the majority of other species of all kinds from that period. That’s pretty much the norm for animal species – they adapt to the ecological conditions of their period, and when those change, give way to other species better adapted to the new conditions.

 

There are still several giant snake species thriving these days. The longest, the reticulated python, has been measured up to 8.7 m, vs. reconstructions of fossil Titanoboa bones showing them to have reach 12.8 m. The most massive, the common anaconda, has been measures up to 97.5 kg, vs. an estimate of 1135 kg for Titanoboa. Titanoboa has a fatter body shape than pythons, more like anacondas. If you scale an anaconda up by the necessary factor (about 2.5 times length, [imath]2.5^3\dot=16[/imath] times mass) and a python (about 1.7 times length, [imath]1.7^3\dot=5[/imath] times mass), you find Titanoboa was not quite as proportionally fat as an anaconda, but much closer to its shape than the pythons long slim shape.

 

Biology appears to do a pretty good job of fitting plants and animals to their habitats’ conditions. Under present conditions, that makes for python and anaconda-size giant snakes. 60,000,000 years ago, the warmer-than-now Paleocene epoch made for titanoboa-size giant snakes.

 

Then there is The Ohio Indian snake mounds - could these have been meant to be life size?

I’m pretty confident saying “no way” to this idea. The Great Serpent Mound depicts a snake anout 420 m long, which scaling up a phython, would mass about 110,000 kg, about the mass of a medium size present day blue whale, or the largest sauropod dinosaurs in the fossil record. Nothing this size built of bone and ligament can draw breath lying on its belly on land – you’ve got to either float the body in water, like a whale, or sling the thorax under some major load-bearing legs and related weight-bearing bones, like an modern elephant (7,000 kg) or the extinct sauropods.

 

Also sea 'serpents' - could these be like sea snakes, versions of Titanoboa that adapted to a different lifestyle?

I don’t see any structural/anatomical reason a snake-body-plan animal couldn’t reach blue-whale mass as a full-time swimmer, but having never read of any such animal being discovered in the fossil record, strongly suspect it’s never happened. I’d say the reason would be that, even during warm epochs like the Jurasic, large bodies of water are colder, favoring giants with more compact and well-insulated body plans, and better heat-regulating physiologies, like mammals’.

 

While there are some good “giant sea serpent” candidates among the giant squid species, these animals aren’t giants in the same sense as 170,000 kg, 30 m blue whale, with maximum measured masses and lengths of about 275 kg and 13 m. Giant squids are mostly long, thin tentacles, with mantles (roughly equivalent to a torso) never longer than about 2.25 m.

 

In The UK's Fortean Times of last year was an edition about giant spider tales, including one story of a Rhodesian farmer (Africa again, note) who claimed to regularly see a gigantic spider cross his path…

There are some pretty big spiders to be found, but the adjective “giant” applied to a spider has a much different meaning in terms of length and mass than when applied to a snake or squid. The largest known spider by length (the giant huntsman spider) has a central body about 0.046 m long, and long, thin legs spanning a gigantic (for a spider) 0.3 m. The most massive known spider (the Goliath birdeater tarantula) has maximum mass of 0.17 kg.

 

Could legends of vampires actually be surviving members of an unknown breed of giant arachnid, that attacked people at night, sucking the life out of them and leaving two distinct puncture wounds?

No spider is big enough to eat of suck enough out of a human to kill them, but they’re all at least slightly, many very, venomous, a few enough (and long-fanged enough) to kill a human. The really big spiders have fangs widely spaced enough that they leave distinct pairs of puncture. So it doesn’t strike me as unreasonable that people with superstitious beliefs about human-killing vampires might see a freak accidental fatal big spider bite on a sleeping human, and take it for evidence of the reality of a vampire preying on humans.

 

In conclusion maybe this would explain humanities fear of snakes, spiders and birds as not unreasonable and possibly based on something other than the small varieties we see nowadays?

Even small snakes and spiders can be very dangerous to humans, so I don’t think giant snakes or spiders are needed to explain why many people are very afraid of them.

 

I’ve not met many people who didn’t have some general phobia/anxiety mental disorder that were afraid of birds, even though even the small ones can be shockingly fierce. Being built very lightly so they can fly, birds, even the big predators and scavengers, just aren’t very dangerous to big solid-bones, dangerous-handed land-dwellers like us humans. The only time I’ve had birds behave aggressively toward me was when I accidentally got too close to a nest with eggs or infants in it, and then they only gave me a few pecks, stopping when I withdrew to a distance they perceived as non-threating to their babies.

 

Lastly, the tales of pterodactyls or 'big birds' in the American West, could they too be surviving relics from a bygone era?

The largest pterosaurs, though not much longer than the largest present-day birds, may have been proportionally much more massive than them, perhaps as large as 150 kg (vs. the largest bird’s 22 kg), or may not have been – it’s difficult to tell for sure from their fossil remains. (see this Discovery news article for more) They were not, however, “giants” in the same sense as an elephant (7,000 kg) or whale (170,000 kg), and almost certainly would not have been overwhelmingly dangerous to a human being, or able grab and fly off with a 75+ kg human, had our two species existed at the same time.

 

Stories of truly gigantic flying animals, like the elephant-snatching Roc, are almost certainly, I think, completely fanciful.

[paigetheoracle]

Yes Craig its me! Been away in my own mind for too long without achieving much, so I'm back!

 

I agree about snakes and water. Zeuglodon would be my best bet for a sea going mammal, appearing serpent like but Tullimonstrum Gregarium might be another as suggested by Ted Halliday, a British author, who thought this might an explanation for The Loch Ness Monster. I didn't mean the snake mound was life-size, just exaggerated to make out possibly giant ones had been seen at the time it was built (Could have had another purpose as well but this way it fell in with my theories. By the way another British author suggested that The Loch Ness Monster could be a giant squid!

 

As for the Roc - this is what I meant about retroactively explaining sightings in the past and the whole point of this thread. I remember watching the helicopter film I mentioned but knew of nothing that big, yet there it was and it didn't look fake. Now thanks to the discovery of Titanoboa, a reasonable candidate has been found to make this film a realistic sighting (Again, could the Gobi desert worm just be an unknown snake like this? Rare but not extinct?). I also found this Rhodesian story intriguing from the same viewpoint. Until we find something preserved in the Burgess shale or similar, science won't admit the evidence could be genuine. Ivan Sanderson mentioned a giant bat in Indonesia that to this day hasn't been rediscovered but he was a reliable explorer.

 

Mysterious World - Ep. 11 - Dragons, Dinosaurs and Giant Snakes 1 of 3

 

If this link doesn't work, just go to You Tube and look up part 1 of Arthur C Clarke's Mysterious World on Dragons, Dinosaurs and Giant Snakes

Edited June 5, 2013 by CraigD
Fixed broken link

[cal]

In The UK's Fortean Times of last year was an edition about giant spider tales, including one story of a Rhodesian farmer (Africa again, note) who claimed to regularly see a gigantic spider cross his path: Could legends of vampires actually be surviving members of an unknown breed of giant arachnid, that attacked people at night, sucking the life out of them and leaving two distinct puncture wounds?

Vampires are intrinsically tied to bats, so I don't think it's possible to link them to spiders, however, there may still be large freaky arachnids from Africa. I believe you are talking about the spiders from the Congo, no? Dispite what CraigD said, this Congo species is the only species of spider that grows up to five feet in diameter and hunts in packs of hundreds. Cause that scares the **** out of me, it doesn't need to be vampiric or any other sort of scary attached to it, it's scary enough as is (and also partly why everyone in the congo owns a gun and is a part of a militant faction).

 

There are these things called

though, with six foot wingspans that are a type of fruit bat and live in colonies of up to 100,000. These two creatures I've talked about are very real organisms, not just folk lores, and as far as I'm concerned, they're much scarier than dragons or vampires or whatevers. Of course, the spiders scare me more than bats, because bats tend to be totally harmless, but still.

 

 

In conclusion maybe this would explain humanities fear of snakes, spiders and birds as not unreasonable and possibly based on something other than the small varieties we see nowadays?

That makes sense, but consider the species I've linked above. There are plenty of current-day small snakes and spiders that are terrifying in their own right, not to mention very deadly. I think it's almost scarier to know that a brown-widow spider, something that takes up less space than my pinky-knuckle, can bite me, without me feeling it, and leave me to die unknowingly within a two hour time span. Nature is hardcore, there's plenty of rational reasons to be afraid of snakes, spiders, and even some birds (vultures and other birds of prey) without having to trace the fear to something ten times our size that lived a million years ago.

Edited June 5, 2013 by Snax

[CraigD]

I believe you are talking about the spiders from the Congo, no? Dispite what CraigD said, this Congo species is the only species of spider that grows up to five feet in diameter and hunts in packs of hundreds.

We need to be skeptical of reports of these spiders ("J'ba FoFi", a phrase meaning simply “giant spider” in Baka), because there’s never been a dead of live specimen, photo, video, nor actual sighting by a credible naturalist. Mostly, tales of them come from books based on stories told by locals to explorers/tourists/missionaries, with the qualification that, while once common, they’re now so rare they likely can’t be found, though an English missionary claims to have “driven several off with his pistol” after they fatally bit several men. The best account on the subject I’ve yet seen is here.

 

Based on this and the wikipedia articles, I don’t believe anyone has claimed to see more than one or a few J'ba FoFi, so claims that they hunt in packs of hundreds sounds like an exaggeration of these dubious original stories.

 

If there is an actual animal provoking these sightings, it’s likely not a true spider - that is, sharing major genes and the physiology of everyday spiders – because of how difficult it is to scale spiders up that much, due to their use hydraulic pressure of their hemolymph fluid rather than true muscles to move. While a successful system in small animals like spiders and scorpions, this scheme doesn’t scale up well, appearing to reach its practical maximum in the big tarantula-like spiders (see here for more).