I hope you all like long tubular creatures, because that’s all I’ve got for you today. Maybe they’d be less horrifying if they had lots of legs?
Here’s a 4-meter long salamander-like beast from the Permian, named Gaiasia.
I’ve seen giant salamanders before, but not ones with big box-like skulls full of razor-sharp fangs.
Here’s another muscular tube, Vasuki indicus, only 47 million years old, but somewhere around 10-15 meters long.
The amusing thing about this beast is that everyone in the popular press treatment is making it all about how long it is — it’s a partial skeleton, there’s not enough to determine exactly how long it is. It’s either shorter than Titanoboa, the gold standard of giant ancient snakes, or bigger than Titanoboa. It’s not a competition, people! They’re separated by about 10 million years. But of course they’re in competition for starring roles in cheesy sci-fi CGI epics.
That’s why we’re seeing ridiculous comparisons like this one:
OK, the snake was longer than T. rex, but so what? It wasn’t as massive, and they were temporally distant from one another. This illustration reveals how some people are thinking:
That could be an ad for the next movie by The Asylum. These kinds of team-ups are popular to promote cheese, like Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla or Dracula vs. Frankenstein. Learn to love Vasuki for itself, OK?