Ancient Indian snake may have been longer than a bus

Washington. An ancient giant snake from India may have been longer than a school bus and weighed more than a ton, researchers reported Thursday.

Fossils found near a coal mine revealed the existence of a snake that was estimated to reach between 11 meters (36 feet) and 15 meters (50 feet) in length. It is comparable to the longest known snake, around 13 meters (42 feet) long, which once lived in what is now Colombia.

The longest living snake today is the Asian reticulated python, which measures 10 meters (33 feet).

The newly discovered colossus lived 57 million years ago in the swampy evergreen forests of western India. It may have weighed up to 1,000 kilograms (2,200 pounds), researchers said in the journal Scientific Reports.

They gave him the name Vasuki indicus in honor of “the mythical snake king Vasuki, coiled around the neck of the Hindu deity Shiva,” said Debajit Datta, from the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee and co-author of the study.

The huge snake was not especially skilled at attacking.

“Considering its large size, Vasuki was a slow ambush predator that subdued its prey by constriction,” Datta said in an email.

In 2005, study co-author Sunil Bajpai of the same institute discovered fragments of the snake’s spine near Kutch, Gujarat, in western India. The researchers compared more than 20 fossil vertebrae with the skeletons of living snakes to calculate their size.

Although it is not known exactly what Vasuki ate, other fossils found in the surrounding area reveal that the snake lived in swampy areas along with catfish, turtles, crocodiles and primitive whales, which may have been its prey, Datta said.