Warm and Fuzzy Snake Tale

Is there anyone who is not afraid of snakes?  Seriously.

I've never been bitten by a snake, let alone swallowed by one, but they scare me even when stuffed and mounted in a museum.

Hollywood knows this.  "Anaconda" was a big hit and it barely tried to be a real snake.  The anaconda was half as big as a submarine and could fly through the air when necessary, as when it had to eat up that bad girl who'd had casual, if tropically hot, sex in reel one.  "Snakes on a Plane" had a title so scary it, fortunately enough, barely needed a movie to go with it.

So? you ask.

So, maybe we are lucky to have what we have.  How would you feel about a snake that ate dinosaurs?  Not just any dinosaurs either, but the young'uns of the largest dinos ever?

Well, paleontologists actually found such a snake when a dinosaur last ruled this land. And the snake was older than Ronald Reagan by decades, at 67 million years.

Ironically, the paleontologists didn't even think it was a snake, just some titanosaur hatchling bones.  Hatchling dinosaurs are the ones fresh from the shell, with yoke still on their cute little claws.  A passel of their bones with no 100-foot stay-at-home titan-o-mom was a nice find, but hardly a career-maker.

Until a guy from the University of Michigan, Jake Wilson, took a second look in 2001.  Hatchlings, sure.  Fossilized dino egg, too.  But, uh, there seemed to be something snaky around it all.  Sure enough, on further paleontologing, Jake and Co. realized that they had a brand new, if very ancient, species of hungry snake found with its young and younger-than-young prey. 

The best part, for snake-lovers and the worst part for the rest of us, is that this eleven and a half foot snake was patiently, almost maternally, keeping the titanosaur eggs and babies warm. 

For dinner.