The largest snake that ever lived and king of the Colombian rainforest 60 million years ago, comes back to life as a full-scale, 48-foot-long model in the Florida Museum of Natural History’s newest exhibit.
The exhibit, Titanoboa: Monster Snake, opened on Saturday and will reside at the museum until Aug. 11.
About 700 people attended the opening day activities, which included live reptile relatives of the fossils on display and a large Titanoboa puzzle on the front lawn. Admission to the exhibit is $5 for Florida residents and $4.50 for kids aged 3 to 17.
The exhibit, the result of collaboration between UF, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, was originally on display at the Smithsonian Institution in a much smaller form.
Because UF is the home of the original fossils, as well as remains from several other reptile species from the Cerrejon coal mine where Titanoboa was found, the team at the Florida Museum was able to turn the exhibit into an extensive look at the larger ecosystem surrounding Titanoboa when it was alive.
The exhibit features a recreation of the dig site, the fossil skull of a newly discovered crocodile, the shell remains from a turtle so large that a grown man could have ridden on it with room to spare and an incredible little box with the vertebrae of an anaconda beside the vertebrae of Titanoboa, which is like setting a golf ball next to a softball.
In addition to the fossil displays, the expanded exhibit also features an active fossil prep lab staffed by geology and paleontology students who clean and sort new Titanoboa fossils that have recently arrived from Colombia.
Florida Museum assistant director for exhibits Darcie MacMahon said that the lab is designed to make the process of paleontology real to people who get to see science in action.
“It’s a lot of fun to watch them work,” she said, “and for kids who come in, it might make them think that maybe this is something they could do one day, too.”
Museum-goers start in the field, head to the lab and then end up with completed fossil displays and life-size replicas.
Ten-year-old Dominic George was there early with his family, taking in the replicas and watching the students work.
“It’s really cool,” he said about the Titanoboa model, “but I want to do the digging part.”
Titanoboa lived during the Paleocene epoch in prehistoric Colombia, millions of years before humanity took its first steps.
Florida Museum associate curator of vertebrate paleontology Jonathan Bloch said it was the largest land predator known to science for 20 million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs.
“It was on a scale with that snake from the Harry Potter movies,” he said. “The fossil record does this all the time. It exceeds the imagination of Hollywood all the time.”
Wildlife ecology and conservation freshman Sean Tupper, 19, holds out a ball python snake to visitors at the Florida Museum of Natural History Saturday afternoon as part of their exhibit Titanoboa: Monster Snake.
