Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Modern anacondas and pythons are massive, but fossil evidence shows they are not even close to the largest snakes to ever exist.

After sitting for over 40 years in a museum collection, a set of small vertebrae has been identified as belonging to a new species of ancient snake, Paradoxophidion richardoweni. This fossil, which ...

A small fossil snake may hold outsized clues about snake evolution, behavior, and an ancient ecosystem that looked nothing ...

Modern giants like pythons and anacondas are among the largest snakes alive today, but they are nothing compared to some of the prehistoric species that once ruled ancient ecosystems. Millions of ...

Most people have never heard of the Cerrejón coal mine, located in Colombia. The mine pumps out over 30 million tons of coal ...

Snakes come in all sizes today, from tiny thread snakes no longer than a pencil to green anacondas that rival small cars in length. You already know the anaconda as one of nature’s heavyweights.

Carlos Jaramillo (top row, third from the right), a staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, co-organized the team that discovered the largest snake in world history. Courtesy ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about biodiversity and the hidden quirks of the natural world. In the humid swamps of what is now Colombia, there was once ...

Katie has a PhD in maths, specializing in the intersection of dynamical systems and number theory. She reports on topics from maths and history to society and animals. Katie has a PhD in maths, ...

Anacondas have been giants of the animal world for over 12 million years, reveals new research. Analysis of fossils from South America shows that the tropical snakes reached their maximum size 12.4 ...