I was wondering – how big would a constrictor-type snake (python, boa) need to be in order to make a meal out of a full-grown African elephant?
You’ve been reading* The Little Prince*, haven’t you?
If you just scale up a snake from a rat I would say about 120 feet long would be conservative guess.
Exactly. Thought of it before opening the thread: “The size of a hat.”
It is the only thing I could think of too.
So about 3 times as large as the largest snake ever to hasve lived in prehistoric times, Titanoboa.
Titanoboa was discovered by some colleagues of mine. We just put together an exhibit here in Panama featuring a full size replica.
“FTFY”?
Fixed that for you. The wiki link was broken.
Edit to add a question: Is there a reason beyond availability of suitable prey that snakes couldn’t get bigger than that?
When I read the title - I thought, “Elephants don’t eat snakes”.
About THIS big:
This was apparently a relatively common illustration in medieval Bestiaries. There’s a variation reproduced in T.H. White’s excellent book The Bestiary: A Book of Beasts
Thanks for the information. I was actually wondering if that huge fossil snake found just a few years back-- I only vaguely remembered it, and couldn’t recall the exact name, so thanks for providing the link and info to “Titanoboa” – would be able to defeat and consume a big elephant.
Yeah, I suppose something three times as big as that serpentine monstrosity would be able to handle a big proboscidean.
As with other big animals, because of the square cube law weight (and the difficulty of moving about) increases three times faster than the length. Even in the case of Titanoboa it is thought that the animal must have been largely aquatic (like an anaconda) in order to be able to move about well. A snake big enough to swallow an elephant might be too big to move.
That’s fantastic!
There’s also a Smithsonian traveling exhibit on the snake with a full-size replica that’s being shown around the US. Here’s the itinerary. It looks like it will be on display near Charlotte NC in late 2015, which could be in your range.
The replica that’s now on display in Panama will be sent to Colombia for display near the coal mine where the original fossils were discovered.
Assuming Titanoboa were to suddenly appear in Pliestocene Europe, would it have been big enough to eat dwarf elephants?
20 ft anacondas don’t move very well on land, I would imagine past 40 ft moving well on land might be close to impossible.
They were probably small enough in physical size. But any elephant with tusks is going to be a severe problem for a snake, since if it started swallowing from the head end (as snakes normally do) it would be unable to get its mouth around them.
That IS a problem I hadn’t foreseen…
goes to adjust his time transfer device…