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MUSIC
NARRATOR: A lost world of giants
60-million years old.
Ruled by a slithering monarch of unbelievable size.
PROF. JASON HEAD: For the last two years the
Smithsonian Institution and the Smithsonian Channel
the University of Florida with the Florida Museum of
Natural History, and now the Nebraska State Museum,
with myself, have been working on a television program
about Titanoboa and about the environments that
it lived in.
NARRATOR: Sliding into the water,
it is coming home.
HEAD: And so we have been filming in Florida,
we have been filming in Canada, we have been filming
in Venezuela where we got to go down and actually
hunt modern anacondas.
HEAD ON LOCATION: This snake looks like she's got a
diameter of about 9, maybe 10 centimeters at the
widest point. Which is one-fifth to one-seventh the
the width of Titanoboa.
HEAD: And so what we have done with this special
is to show people the pattern, the history of discovery
and how we came up with the ideas that we had about
what Titanoboa means for its environment, it's climate
and also how we make inferences about the biology
of the animal: how big it got, what it ate, how it lived.
Really the important thing about the discovery of
Titanoboa is not that just it's this amazingly big snake
and that it's very cool that snakes can get that big.
It's what it tells us about the world.
NARRATOR: Jason Head, their expert in extinct snakes
makes his first visit to Cerrejon.
HEAD: Now of course we don't really have a lot of
skulls for the fossil record of snakes because they're
very light and they break apart after the
animals die.
HEAD: When I was a kid looking at animals,
I had no idea that I'd be in this position one day.
And they used to have a big life sized Triceratops
model in front of the natural history museum.
And I used to climb around on it as a little kid and
then go in the museum galleries just like this gallery
and look around and be all wide eyed.
And now I'm actually having the opportunity as an
adult to kind of live that dream and to be helping
construct galleries like this and to provide the
research that is making other little kids look
around and wide-eyed.
And so, the greatest thing for me is that if there's
a seven or eight year old who is going to watch
the special and see Titanoboa and get inspired
to be a paleontologist... if I can get a couple of
kids to do that, than I've definitely kind of
made my mark.
NARRATOR: And she disappears for 60-million years.