World’s Largest Snake Coming to Academy of Natural Sciences
Photo courtesy of Smithsonian
Close your ears, ophidiophobiacs.
Titanoboa, also known as the largest snake that ever slithered around the planet, is coming to Philadelphia next February. The Smithsonian traveling exhibit “Titanoboa: Monster Snake” will open at the Academy of Natural Sciences on Valentine’s Day, and the centerpiece will be a life-size replica of the 48-foot-long, 2,500 pound Titanoboa cerrejonensis.
The exhibit delves into the history of the discovery of Titanoboa in 2009, when a team of scientists found the mammoth reptile in an open-pit coal mine in La Guajira, Colombia. They project that it lived in hot and humid climates 60 million years ago—5 million years after the dinosaurs went extinct. It killed with constriction, squeezing life out of its prey with 400 pounds per square inch of pressure. That, according to Smithsonian, is equal to the weight of three (three!) Eiffel Towers.
And you can be starring right in this sucker’s beady eyes in a matter of months.
The exhibit opens February 14, 2015 and will run through April 19th at the Academy of Natural Sciences at Drexel University. More information can be found here.
