Gigantophis


Gigantophis garstini is an extinct giant snake. Before the Paleocene constrictor genus Titanoboa was described from Colombia in 2009, Gigantophis was regarded as the largest snake ever recorded. Gigantophis 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

Jason Head, of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, has compared fossil Gigantophis 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.
Later estimates, based on allometric equations scaled from the articular processes of tail vertebrae referred to Gigantophis, revised the length of Gigantophis to.

Discovery

The species is known only from a small number of fossils, mostly vertebrae.
Its discovery was published in 1901 by paleontologist Charles William Andrews, who described it, estimated its length to be about 30 feet, and named it garstini in honor of Sir William Garstin, KCMG, the Under Secretary of State for Public Works in Egypt.

Classification

Gigantophis is classified as a member of the extinct family Madtsoiidae.