Dominating this era was Titanoboa, the undisputed largest snake in the history of the world. The fossilized remains revealed that, after the extinction of the dinosaurs, the tropics were warmer than today and witnessed the birth of the South American rainforest, in which huge creatures battled it out to become the planet’s top predators. Together with their research teams, Jonathan Bloch of the Florida Museum of Natural History, University of Florida and Carlos Jaramillo of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, joined forces with one of the world’s foremost experts in ancient snakes, Jason Head of the University of Nebraska, to unlock the mysteries of this ancient time and discover exactly how Titanoboa appeared, lived and hunted. But their most spectacular discovery was the fossilized vertebrae of a previously undiscovered species of snake, one so large it defied imagination.

Fossil finds included giant turtles and crocodiles, as well as the first known bean plants and some of the earliest banana, avocado and chocolate plants. Over the following decade, collecting expeditions led by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and the Florida Museum of Natural History, University of Florida opened a unique window into perhaps the first rainforest on Earth. The story behind this significant scientific revelation began in 2002, when a Colombian student visiting the coal mine made an intriguing discovery: a fossilized leaf that hinted at an ancient rainforest from the Paleocene epoch. Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives, African Art.

Largest anaconda ever