SENSATIONAL SERPENT!
World’s biggest snake discovered in Amazon jungle
THE world’s biggest snake — 26 feet long with a fanged head the size of a man’s — has been found slithering through South America’s forbidding Amazon jungle — and the monster is larger than the mythical man-eater in Jennifer Lopez’s chilling horror flick Anaconda! The 440-pound northern green anaconda — which crushes prey in powerful coils as thick around as a car tire — was discovered by an expedition led by Dutch biologist and TV wildlife host Professor Freek Vonk.
The snake is one foot longer than the savage serpent that stalked Lopez in her 1997 film. Unknown until 40-year-old Vonk’s discovery, the northern green anaconda is now the largest snake species in the world, according to scientists. “As we all know it from movies and stories about giant snakes, there are actually two different species,” says Vonk. “The green anacondas found in the north of their range in South America — including Venezuela, Suriname and French Guiana — appear to belong to a completely different species.
“Although they look almost identical at first glance, the genetic difference between the two is 5.5 percent, and that is huge.
“To put this in perspective, humans and chimpanzees are only genetically different from each other by about 2 percent.”
Professor Jesus Rivas, the lead author of the study, and his wife, Dr. Sarah CoreyRivas, first realized there was more than one species of green anaconda over 15 years ago, but it took this long to discover the beast.
Now Rivas wonders whether an even bigger snake exists, saying “I have been studying anacondas for 32 years, so this begs the question of how many other species there are that we do not know about.”