Reptiles grow according to the temperature they live in. The biggest reptiles on Earth are found in the tropics and they gradually get smaller the closer to the Poles they live.A study published in Nature Magazine today has found a fossil of a snake that would have been at least 13meters long and weighed over a ton! This is larger than any other snake living now or at any time in the past. The gigantic size of the snake suggests that the climate of the South American Rainforest it lived in was about 5 degrees warmer than today’s temperatures.
This gives us a little insight into what the world could again look like if we continue to warm our world with greenhouse gases. What else could we be in for?
This site has more great photos of the fossils. http://blogs.mirror.co.uk/science/2009/02/scientists-discover-worlds-lar.html
Image: Kenneth Krysko
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5 comments:
Was it an unexpected finding? Did scientists think that the temperature was ever warm enough for such a massive cold-blooded reptile to survive?
Yes finding a snake this large was unexpected. Firstly it’s a massive snake, but secondly and more importantly, it shows that we don't know everything about our past climates and therefore what we might experience in future climates.
It was thought that there was some kind of temperature boundary like a natural thermostat in the tropics, making sure it stayed at a stable temperature. This finding suggests that that isn’t true, but that the tropics, like the rest of the planet can get much hotter.
So what will happen if the tropics get warmer - will the rainforests disappear?
Seemingly not - and that is another puzzle. There are plenty of other fossils of rainforest plants found at the same time as the giant snake, so scientists are thinking that perhaps warmer temperatures won’t kill off all our rainforests, like we thought. Or at least we have evidence to suggest that some rainforests can exist in higher temperatures than expected.
Even if climate change isn't bad news for rainforests, surely it's hard to separate this from the more general effects of human activity...isn't this leading to a net loss of forest?
But back to the point...maybe the threat of big snakes could be integrated into our climate change communication strategy.
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