I guess this snake was in the Garden of Eden ...

From today's Toronto Star:

An ancient snake as long as a bus and weighing about the same as a car probably ate crocodiles for lunch, a University of Toronto researcher says.

The "dinosaur-sized" constrictor dwarfed any serpent ever known to slither across the face of the Earth, nearly twice as long as today's anacondas and pythons.

"It is the world's largest snake," said lead study author Jason Head, a U of T paleontologist.
"It certainly shows that we have no idea what the body-size limits on being a snake are," Head said of the ophiophobiac's nightmare.

The study, which says the aptly named Titanoboa cerrejonensis likely existed some 60 million years ago, will be published tomorrow in the journal Nature.

With an estimated body length of 13 to 15 metres and a weight of 1.25 tonnes, the non-venomous, water-based reptile coiled around its prey and squeezed the life out of it, like modern-day boa constrictors.

"This would have been an aquatic snake that specialized in eating large aquatic vertebrates," says Head. And which aquatic vertebrates in particular? "Primitive crocodiles," Head says, adding the serpents would have swallowed their toothy victims whole.

The species' giant size was deduced from about 180 vertebrae and ribs – representing at least 28 different snakes – found in a Colombian coal mine about two years ago.

By comparing the size of the bones to those of living boas, the researchers were able to extrapolate the ancient anaconda's size, Head says.

The fossilized bones were found in rocks that were 58 to 60 million years old, which means the creatures existed about 6 million years after the dinosaurs perished.

But Royal Ontario Museum paleontologist David Evans said the super-sized serpent had true dinosaur proportions.

"In terms of its size this thing is just enormous," said Evans.

"It is so huge it just basically blows all other snakes that we've known of out of the water in terms of its size. It is really truly huge."

Evans said the snake was as long as an average Tyrannosaurus rex and as heavy as the smaller carnivore Allosaurus.

It would barely be able to squeeze through an average household door.

Evans says the study also sheds light on the relationships between temperatures and snake size - theorizing global warming could well give the world larger snakes.

Cold-blooded, like all snakes, Titanoboa would have required an average temperature of about 33C – eight degrees warmer than those currently found in equatorial South America, the paper says.

"The authors have been able to correlate body size changes in snakes with the temperature of the planet," Evans says.

Today's biggest snake, the green anaconda, measures a maximum 7.5 metres in length. The Reticulated Python can grow to nine metres, but is lighter than the water-based anaconda.
Previously, the largest fossilized snake ever found was the Gigantophis, which was about 11.5 metres long.

Head, whose paleontological specialty is giant snakes, became involved in the project after University of Florida colleague Jonathan Bloch showed him some vertebrae during a videophone conversation.

"He held up the giant snake on the video screen and I jumped out of my seat," Head recalls.
"He was laughing and I was laughing because we knew we had the world's largest snake."
Head says snakes as a species are great survivors, having slithered alongside of dinosaurs as long as 99.5 million years ago.

Any Creationist explanations for the above would be greatly appreciated.