Gigantophis
Sign in to saveGigantophis is an extinct genus of giant snake containing a single species, G. garstini. Before the Paleocene constrictor genus Titanoboa was described from Colombia in 2009, G. garstini was regarded as the largest snake ever recorded. It lived about 40 million years ago during the Eocene epoch of the Paleogene Period, in the Paratethys Sea, within the northern Sahara, where Egypt and Algeria are now located.
Wikidata facts
- Parent taxon
- Madtsoiidae
Show 2 more facts
- taxon name
- Gigantophis
- taxon rank
- genus
Sources (1)
via Wikidata · CC0
~2 min read
Encyclopedic overview
6 sectionsContents
- Description
- Size
- Discovery
- Ecology
- Classification
- References
Gigantophis is an extinct genus of giant snake containing a single species, G. garstini. Before the Paleocene constrictor genus Titanoboa was described from Colombia in 2009, G. garstini was regarded as the largest snake ever recorded. It lived about 40 million years ago during the Eocene epoch of the Paleogene Period, in the Paratethys Sea, within the northern Sahara, where Egypt and Algeria are now located.
== Description == === Size === left|thumb|A diagram showing the estimated lengths of Gigantophis garstini (in red) compared to other large snakes Jason Head, of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, has compared fossil Gigantophis garstini vertebrae to those of the largest modern snakes, and concluded that the extinct snake could grow from in length. If , it would have been more than 10% longer than its largest living relatives.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Gigantophis” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.