Titanoboa: Monster Snake

Sternberg Museum of Natural History Presents

Organized by The Smithsonian Institute Will be in Hays Through August 2, 2015

A Supplement of

A Mayoral Welcome

By Eber Phelps, Hays Mayor Whether you are a resident or visiting Hays I think you will agree there is an abundance of things to do and see throughout the community.

We are very proud to be home to Fort Hays State University, North Central Kansas Technical College, Hays Medical Center and numerous other points of interest. A constant draw to our city is the world famous Sternberg Museum of Natural History nestled in the northeast corner of the city near I-70.

Throughout the year thousands of visitors are drawn to the museum to experience the sights and sounds of the many permanent and traveling exhibits on display. Over the years visitors have been treated to a number of world class Smithsonian exhibits such as the T Rex and Crocadillia displays. The current exhibit,

“Titanoboa,” will certainly rank high as one of the more memorable exhibits to hold center stage at Sternberg. The 48foot, 2,500-pound snake lived 60 million years ago and was capable of crushing a crocodile. This monster is believed to be the largest known snake in the world and will certainly leave you awestruck.

Please join me and the thousands of visitors who will have this incredible opportunity to see an exhibit of this magnitude.

I am confident you will be impressed with this display as well as the thousands of other prehistoric artifacts housed in the museum collection. After your museum experience I invite you to spend time in our community and enjoy the many other activities that await you.

Slithering in at 48-feet long and weighing an estimated one-and-a-half tons, a realistic replica of the world’s largest snake is on exhibit at the Sternberg Museum of Natural History in Hays until Aug. 2. Sixty million years ago, in the era after the mass extinction of the dinosaurs, scientists believe that a colossal snake related to modern boa constrictors thrived in a hot tropical climate.

“Titanoboa: Monster Snake” includes the snake replica and two vertebrae casts made from the original fossils: a 17-foot-long modern green anaconda and the vertebra from Titanoboa, as the giant

snake is called. Organized by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service in collaboration with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, the Smithsonian Channel, and the Florida Museum of Natural History, “Titanoboa: Monster Snake” is an amazing look at a lost world and the incredible creatures that inhabited it.

“Titanoboa” will travel to 15 cities on a national tour organized by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service. The exhibit came to Hays from Philadelphia, and will travel to Seattle from here.

Illustration by Jason Bourque Florida Museum of Natural History Titanoboa, pictured with a dyrosaur and a turtle, ruled the swampy South American tropics 58 million years ago.

Super-Sized Serpent Slithering to The Sternberg

By Reese Barrick Fort Hays State University’s Sternberg Museum of Natural History has a mission to emphasize the natural history of Kansas and the Great Plains region. Our permanent exhibits and education programs keep this mission front and center.

Each year, however, the museum has the opportunity to bring in at least one traveling temporary exhibit. We take this opportunity to bring in exhibits with exciting stories of Earth’s natural history from all over the world. Some of these exhibits are related to fabulous paleontological discoveries such as SuperCroc (summer of 2010) and Giants (summer of 2012), both of which shared with us the amazing discoveries from North Africa during the 1990s and 2000s.

As you might expect, it often takes a great deal of time between the discovery of new fossil animals, their preparation out of the rock that entombed them, studies completed by paleontologists and finally ending with the production of a museum exhibit.

Titanoboa was a snake whose fossil vertebrae were initially discovered in the South American country of Colombia quite recently (2007). The Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service collaborated with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, the Florida Museum of Natural History, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and the Smithsonian Channel to bring this exhibition to fruition. It became available to museums

across the country in 2013, a very quick turnaround from its initial discovery.

We were interested in “Titanoboa: Monster Snake” for three reasons. First of all, it brings another fascinating example of animal gigantism, this time showing how reptiles grew to massive sizes in a warm tropical world devoid of large dinosaurian or mammalian predators.

Secondly, the exhibit shares a story from South America, a continent bursting with new and exciting paleontological discoveries.

Finally, Titanoboa dovetails nicely with the museum’s exhibit, Rattlers, and our many programs involving snakes and their under appreciated natural history.

When I first heard about Titanoboa, we were already scheduled with summer exhibits through 2014 and I felt that it was important that we bring it in for the summer in order to give it exposure to the widest public possible.

So we contacted the Smithsonian Traveling Exhibition Service and fortunately were able to schedule it for this summer!

We are only the seventh venue to be able to show off this incredible snake and after it leaves the Sternberg, the exhibit is booked across the country through 2017. You don’t have to be a lover of snakes to marvel at the immense size and stature of Titanoboa: Monster Snake, and let your imagination take you to the world in which it lived. This summer, I hope you will!

Dr. Reese Barrick is the museum director at Fort Hays State University’s Sternberg Museum of Natural History.

Titan

of Snakes

Titanoboa cerrejonensis

“Titanoboa” Age:

60 million Years

Length: 48 Feet

Weight:

2,500 Pounds

Origin:

Cerrejon, South America

Photo by Carlos Jaramillo / Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute

Finding a 48-Foot Snake

By Guy Gugliotta, for the Smithsonian Magazine In the lowland tropics of northern Colombia, 60 miles from the Caribbean coast, Cerrejón is an empty, forbidding, seemingly endless horizon of dusty outback, stripped of vegetation and crisscrossed with dirt roads that lead to enormous pits 15 miles in circumference. It is one of the world’s largest coal operations, covering an area larger than Washington, D.C. and employing some 10,000 workers.

Cerrejón also happens to be one of the world’s richest, most important fossil deposits, providing scientists with a unique snapshot of the geological moment when the dinosaurs had just disappeared and a new environment was emerging.

“Cerrejón is the best, and probably the only, window on

a complete ancient tropical ecosystem anywhere in the world,” said Carlos Jaramillo, a paleontologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. “The plants, the animals, everything. We have it all, and you can’t find it anywhere else in the tropics.”

Fifty-eight million years ago, a few million years after the fall of the dinosaurs, Cerrejón was an immense, swampy jungle where everything was hotter, wetter and bigger than it is today.

The trees had wider leaves, indicating greater precipitation — more than 150 inches of rain per year, compared with 80 inches for the Amazon now. Mean temperatures may have hovered in the mid- to high-80s Fahrenheit or higher. Deep water from north-flowing rivers swirled around stands of palm trees, hardwoods, occasional hum-

ABOVE: Scientists in the field have recovered dozens of monster snakes from the Cerejón coal mine in northern Colombia. BELOW: Palentologist Jonathan Bloch demonstrates a Titanoboa vertebra dwarfs a modern anaconda.

Photo by Jeff Gage, Florida Museum of Natural History

mocks of earth and decaying vegetation. Mud from the flood plain periodically coated, covered and compressed the dead leaves, branches and animal carcasses in steaming layers of decomposing muck dozens of feet thick.

The river basin held turtles with shells twice the size of manhole covers and crocodile kin — at least three different species — more than a dozen

feet long. And there were 7-foot-long lungfish, two to three times the size of their modern Amazon cousins.

The lord of this jungle was a truly spectacular creature — a snake more than 40 feet long and weighing more than a ton. This giant serpent looked something like a modern-day boa constrictor, but behaved more like today’s water-dwelling anaconda. It was a swamp

Photo by James Di Loreto / Smithsonian Institution

CROC-EATING CROC-EATING SNAK SNAKE E denizen and a fearsome predator, able to eat any animal that caught its eye. The thickest part of its body would be nearly as high as a man’s waist. Scientists call it Titanoboa cerrejonensis.

It was the largest snake ever, and if its astounding size

BOA Bites You say that your findings provide insights into the biological size limits on the evolution of snakes. What are some of the factors involved?

The upper growing limits of any organism are conditioned by the resources available, the physiology of each animal and physical forces such as gravity. Ambient temperature is especially important to cold-blooded animals; that’s why the largest snakes on earth live near the Equator. Snakes are cold-blooded, so the higher ambient temperatures allowed Titanoboas, which lived 60 million years ago, to grow larger than current-day snakes.

The Titanoboa model is traveling the country. alone wasn’t enough to dazzle the most sunburned fossil hunter, the fact of its existence may have implications for understanding the history of life on earth and possibly even for anticipating the future.

Titanoboa became the star of “Titanoboa: Monster Snake,” which aired on the Smithsonian Channel. Research on the snake and its environment continues, and I caught up with the Titanoboa team during the 2011 field season.

Jonathan Bloch, a University of Florida paleontologist, and Jason Head, a paleontologist at the University of Nebraska, were crouched beneath a relentless tropical sun examining a set of Titanoboa remains with a Smithsonian Institution intern named Jorge Moreno-Bernal, who had discovered the fossil a few weeks earlier. All three were slathered with sunblock and carried heavy water bottles.

They wore long-sleeved shirts

and tramped around in heavy hiking boots on the shadeless moonscape whose ground cover was shaved away years ago by machinery.

“It’s probably an animal in the 30- to 35-foot range,” Bloch said of the new find, but size was not what he was thinking about. What had Bloch’s stomach aflutter on this brilliant Caribbean forenoon was lying in the shale five feet away.

“You just never find a snake skull, and we have one,” Bloch said. Snake skulls are made of several delicate bones that are not very well fused together.

“When the animal dies, the skull falls apart,” Bloch explained. “The bones get lost.”

The snake skull embraced by the Cerrejón shale mudstone was a piece of Titanoboa that Bloch, Head and their colleagues had been hoping to find for years. “It offers a whole new set of characteristics,” Bloch said. The skull will

BOA Bites One would think that openpit coal mining would destroy fossils. Apparently not. Why not?

The fossils are usually below the coal seams so actually the mining uncovers the fossils for us; the mine is an ideal place to look for fossils. The big mining machines remove tons of coal and expose hundreds of square meters of rocks. That’s where the fossils are.

enhance researchers’ ability to compare Titanoboa to other snakes and figure out where it sits on the evolutionary tree. It will provide further information about its size and what it ate.

Even better, added Head, gesturing at the skeleton lying at his feet, “our hypothesis is that the skull matches the skeleton. We think it’s one animal.”

Looking around the colossal mine, evidence of an ancient wilderness can be seen everywhere. Every time another feet-thick vein of coal is trucked away, an underlayer of mudstone is left behind, rich in the fossils of exotic leaves and plants and in the bones of fabulous creatures.

“When I find something good, it’s a biological reaction,” said Bloch. “It starts in my stomach.”

Cerrejón has provided Bloch with many such moments.

The search for the river monsters of the Paleocene Epoch began here by accident 18 years ago, when Colombian geologist Henry Garcia found an unfamiliar fossil. He put the specimen in a coal company display case, where it was labeled “Petrified Branch” and forgotten.

Nine years later, Fabiany Herrera, an undergraduate geology student at Colombia’s Industrial University of Santander, in Bucaramanga, visited Cerrejón on a field trip.

Tramping around the coal fields at the mining complex, he picked up a piece of sandstone and turned it over.

There was an impression of a fossil leaf on it. He picked up another rock. Same thing. And again.

Herrera showed his discoveries to Jaramillo, who was working for the state oil company at that time and suspected that Cerrejón might have a lot more to offer than interesting rocks and coal formations. He and Herrera organized a full-scale expedition to Cerrejón in 2003 and invited paleobiologist Scott Wing, curator of fossil plants at Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, to join them.

Most fossils, plant or animal, are found either in temperate climates or in isolated niches in the tropics, such as deserts or high altitudes, where wind blows away sand and stone to expose ancient remains.

Other fossils near the equator lie buried and inaccessible beneath millions of tons of soil and vegetation. At Cerrejón, the quest for coal had stripped away this shroud.

Herrera, with help from other researchers, spent four months at Cerrejón, collecting more than 2,000 plant specimens from several different pit mines. He did not know what to expect, because no one had ever explored a site of Cerrejón’s age and location.

Instead of an ancient forest filled with unfamiliar species,

BOA Bites

Did these snakes have any natural enemies? How long did they live?

We think that their natural enemies attacked eggs and juveniles. The same crocodiles that Titanoboas themselves ate could have preyed on the big snakes’ eggs and the young Titanoboas. We still don’t know anything about their lifespans; that is very difficult to know from the fossil record that we have.

BOA Bites

Can you please tell us more about the big snake fossil excavation process?

We had been working in the mine for seven years. Cerrejon is the biggest open pit coal mine in the world...It took about two years to figure out that [the fossils were] a snake and collect enough material to be sure about it. Jason Bourque, a student at the University of Florida, was the first one that realized it was a snake; we had thought it was a crocodile because of its size.

Photo by Ray Carson, University of Florida

In Gainesville, Jason Bourque (left), Alex Hastings (center) and Jonathan Block (right) examine several bones and fossils from Titanoboa in the vertebrate paleontology lab at Florida Museum of Natural History.

“I was extremely excited,” Bloch recalled. “I was sure we were going to see unbelievable stuff down there.” “the plants were all relatives of stuff we find today,” Herrera said. “We’ve got chocolate, coconuts and bananas and legumes — not as diverse as today, but the origins of the modern South American rainforest are suddenly there.”

When Wing arrived at the mine, he looked in the coal company display case and decided that the “Petrified Branch” was not what it seemed — and that plants were not the only attraction in Cerrejón. “I had a point-andshoot camera,” Wing recalled.

“Early in the visit I asked if the company could open the find the key.” Wing took some pictures through the glass, returned to the United States and e-mailed them to Bloch at the University of Florida in Gainesville, a collaborator on an unrelated project.

“I flipped out,” Bloch said.

He was looking at part of the fossil jawbone of a land animal. Terrestrial vertebrates of that age had never been seen in the tropical latitudes of

South America. The jawbone came from a dyrosaur, a very large crocodile-like creature now extinct. The fossil signaled that there were probably other vertebrate discoveries to be made.

Bloch and Wing immediately made plans for another trip and met Herrera and Jaramillo in Cerrejón. Wing showed Bloch the display case and started wiggling the lock. The glass broke. Wing reached in, plucked out the dyrosaur specimen and found a second bone hidden behind it, which “looked like a piece of pelvis,” Wing recalled. It was.

Garcia explained he had found the fossil at a mine site known as the Expanded West Pit. He took the visitors there. A layer of coal had been removed from the surface, leaving a vast expanse of naked mudstone baking in the tropical sun. “It was covered with turtle shells,” Herrera recalled. They were bleached white and shimmering in the heat.

The team collected fossils and returned to Gainesville.

Over the next few months, U.S. and Colombian students explored other Cerrejón sites and e-mailed photos to Bloch.

The La Puente Cut, an enormous open pit covering 6,000 acres of Cerrejón’s North Zone, appeared to be the most promising.

“I was extremely excited,” Bloch recalled. “I was sure we were going to see unbelievable stuff down there.”

During that expedition, in 2004, the researchers grabbed everything they saw, and everything was big: ribs, vertebrae, parts of a pelvis, a shoulder blade, turtle shells more than five feet across.

They found bits of dyrosaur and turtle everywhere, and other animals as well, but the team could not sort everything immediately. They put what they could in plastic bags, then dug pits and cast the big pieces in plaster of Paris.

“It’s like prospecting,” Bloch said. Walk along with brushes and tweezers and eyes focused on the ground until you find something you want. Put the little bits in plastic bags and label them. Mark the bigger pieces on a GPS device and come back the next day with plaster and a tarp. Wait too long, and the GPS reading is useless: The rain is a curse, washing everything down the slope, never to be seen again.

Florida graduate student Alex Hastings described But the rain is also a blessing, for when it stops, a whole new fossil field lies open for exploration.

For the next five years, Bloch and Jaramillo led field trips to Cerrejón and sent a steady stream of vertebrate fossils to Gainesville. Many of the remains looked a bit like those from modern animals, only much bigger. One new species of turtle was five and a half feet long, 67 percent larger than today’s biggest Amazon river turtles.

Although there are no modern dyrosaurs to compare with the fossils, University of

three new species, one of which was between 15 and 22 feet long.

Another beast was a “dietary generalist,” Hastings said, who “could eat the large turtles.” It had huge jaws and a “death bite” that could penetrate the shell 1.5 feet in from its edge. “These are big animals.”

In 2007, Hastings was inspecting a shipment of fossils labeled “crocodile” and noticed a strange — and very large — vertebra. To his trained eye, it was clearly “not from a croc.” He showed it to fellow graduate student Jason Bourque, a fossil conservationist and reptile specialist.

“That’s a snake,” Bourque said. He delved into the university’s reptile collections and came up with the verte-

When you’re checking for the Titanoboa under your bed, your electric cooperative will provide the light.

Yep, we’re always looking out for you.

bra of an anaconda. It was smaller but reasonably close in appearance to the fossil.

Bloch, Hastings and the rest of the team began ransacking the Cerrejón specimens. Fresh expeditions visited La Puente to search for more pieces of fossil snake. Eventually the team collected 100 snake vertebrae from 28 different animals.

“We’d had some of them for years,” Bloch said. “My only excuse for not recognizing them is that I’ve picked up snake vertebrae before. And I said, ‘These can’t be snake vertebrae.’ It’s like somebody handed me a mouse skull the size of a rhinoceros and told me ‘That’s a mouse.’ It’s just not possible.”

Except, apparently, it was.

“I needed to know how big the snake was, so I called the only guy in the world who would be able to tell me,”

“IT HAD HUGE JAWS AND A DEATH BITE.”

Bloch said. That was Jason Head, then working at the University of Toronto. They had met in the early 1990s when Bloch was a graduate student at the University of Michigan and Head was an undergraduate.

Bloch gathered up “a whole bunch” of bone samples, carried them into his office and called up Head for a computer iChat. He held up a vertebra so Head could see it.

Was this a snake?

“I’m buying my ticket tonight,” Head said.

Guy Gugliotta, a former reporter for The Washington Post, writes frequently for Smithsonian and is the author of “Freedom’s Cap: The United States Capitol and the Coming of the Civil War.”

Through The Ages In addition to the Titanoboa exhibit, the Sternberg Museum offers a wide variety of other displays.

Tales of Long Ago...

In the age of dinosaurs, warm seas inundated Kansas.

The Western Interior Seaway of the Cretaceous period stretched from the Arctic to the Gulf of Mexico and divided North America into two large land masses. Dinosaurs prowled the shores and uplands. Flying reptiles soared overhead and ventured out over the seaway to feed on abundant fish. Giant marine reptiles lurked beneath the waves. The soft sediments of the sea floor preserved the remains of many of the creatures that thrived in that sea. Over millions of years, the sediments were buried,

ABOVE: The Fish Within a Fish BELOW: Quinter High School students tour the Sternberg on National Fossil Day - Oct. 14. Photos By Mike Corn / The Hays Daily News

discovered his first fossil and launched an illustrious career.

Sternberg spent his life collecting fossils throughout western North America and trained his three sons to do the same. His eldest son, George F. Sternberg, eventually returned to the fossil-rich chalk fields of western Kansas. Here, George worked tirelessly to build up the museum that today bears the name of his famous family of fossil hunters.

Today and Tomorrow

compressed into chalk, and eventually uplifted as the sea receded. As erosion gradually exposed the chalk, its hidden fossil treasures awaited discovery.

Not So Long Ago...

Shortly after the Civil War, a young Charles H. Sternberg moved to Kansas. Here he

But it doesn’t stop there.

Ongoing field work and scientific research yields growing collections and an evolving understanding of our living world. They help us to answer many of the difficult questions facing society today and into the future. Dynamic exhibits present new scientific findings, classic interpretations, and the challenges of tomorrow in a fun, engaging, and meaningful way.

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in the Permanent and Temporary Exhibits

A Fossil Treasure Trove

Begin your exhibit experience in a replicated fossil dig site. Here, George Sternberg excavates one of his most famous fossil finds—the world famous Fish-within-a-Fish.

In 1952, Sternberg discovered this 14-foot Xiphactinus (Zie-FACT-i-nus) with its final meal, a 6-foot Gillicus, preserved within its ribcage. Next to the actual specimen, home movies of the original excavation help tell the story of this amazing fossil.

Explore our spectacular collection of Kansas fossils from the age of dinosaurs. Discover huge marine reptiles, toothed birds, and giant clams. Find flying reptiles, sharks, and other strange fishes. Learn how to read the exciting dramas of life and death played out in

LEFT: A monitor lizard is used to help show how mosasaurs – reptiles that lived millions of years ago – once swam in the deep inland ocean. RIGHT: Paleontologist Laura Wilson answers questions about the mosasaur on display. Photos By Mike Corn / The Hays Daily News

the Cretaceous seas of Kansas and recorded in the fossils left behind. Examine rare TYPE SPECIMENS — individual fossils that serve as the name bearer and scientific reference for an entire species. In the demonstration lab, watch actual fossil preparation or learn about ongoing research.

Search for buried prehistoric

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treasures in a fossil dig pit designed especially for budding paleontologists.

Step Back in Time Wind your way into a cave in the replicated chalk cliffs and find yourself immersed in the watery world that formed the chalk. These warm seas teemed with sharks, real life sea serpents, and monstrous predatory fishes.

Emerge from the sea onto a subtropical shore. Huge flying reptiles soar overhead.

Listen for their calls above the sound of the crashing surf.

Stroll through lush vegetation among life-sized animated dinosaurs and other ancient creatures. But tread carefully — T. rex might be prowling for a light snack and you might just catch his eye.

Bringing Fossils to Life: Living Ties to Deep Time

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This exhibit pairs living and fossil organisms to explain and explore different evolutionary themes: stasis, convergence, functional morphology, and transitions.

Living organisms on display include Giant Tortoises, Mudskippers and Tiger Salaman-

ders. Witness evolutionary stasis while learning about the tortoises. There must be something about feeling the solid earth under your fins as evolution continues to provide opportunities for fish to leave water. Learn how Mudskippers and other fish today are adapting to life on land.

Rattlerssss The Sternberg Museum has created a one-of-a-kind educational exhibit on the rattlesnakes of the United States entitled “Rattlerssss: From Fear to Fascination.”

Over 40 species of rattlesnake are alive on the earth today, 23 of which occur somewhere in the United States.

This exhibit centers on the display of live rattlesnakes, ranging from the gigantic Eastern Diamondback to the extremely toxic Tiger Rattlesnake. Come learn about where these snakes occur, the habitats they live in, and the unique behaviors and adaptations of each species.

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CAMPS

Join in the fun when we explore fossils, reptiles, birds, mammals, plants, rocks and other cool stuff. Be a junior naturalist, paleontologist or biologist. We even offer several camps for whole families to explore and enjoy. Using the spectacular natural history resources of Kansas, the Sternberg Museum education and science staff presents experience-driven lessons and activities that get students directly involved in the

PROGRAMS

For more information, prices or to register call: 785-628-5506 or visit: www.sternberg.fhsu.edu

Weekly Tuesday 3:00 – 5:00pm May 26 – Trail Quest June 2 – Kinetics Get it Moving June 9 – Legs Legs Legs Legs!

June 16 – Whoo Upchucked June 23 – Nature Enlarged June 30 – Swallow Tales “It ate Your Momma’s Drill”

July 7 – Bag of Bones July 21 – Extinct - Extant- ExtWhat?

July 28 – Eggs- They’re More Than Just Breakfast!

Aug 4 – Museum Memories Aug 11 –Trail Quest 2

process of science. We emphasize building knowledge,

Preschool

skills and the mental tools to deal with information

10:00 – 11:00am 1st & 3rd Wednesday of the month

and questions in a scientific manner. We look forward

June 4 & 17 – Nature Trail Bingo July 2 & 15 – Big or Tall, Short or Small Which are You? Aug. 6 & 19 – Picture Perfect

to sharing the wonder of science and exploration with you this summer!

You can find information about the 2015 Sternberg Museum Summer Camps at: http://sternberg.fhsu.edu/active-learning/camps

Email: dalevering@fhsu.edu

Friday Night at the Museum The 3rd Friday of the month 6:00 – 9:00pm June 19 – Titanoboa is on the Prowl Aug. 21 – It’s About Time!

Family June 6 – Journey to the Bottom of the Cretaceous Sea – 5:00-9:00pm Aug. 1 – Journey to the Bottom of the Cretaceous Sea – 5:00-9:00pm Aug. 29 – The Might Monarch Hunt – 9:00am - 12:00pm