Beam me to Planet Gore !
Posted on 02/05/2009 8:03:03 AM PST by RLM
These people have the right of it.
I remember reading in the UN Charter someplace that there is an Unalienable Universal Right Of Children Everywhere To Have Winter Sledding.
LOL!
Well, then, you've already gotten your wish, dummy. Look at the data for the last decade.
The warmistas are running out of time, due to an Inconvenient Reality, so they’re trying to lock in the targeted wealth-transferring mechanisms before the public catches on.
Maybe we’ll see the return of these:
Largest Snake as Long as a Bus
4 February 2009
Paul Rincon
BBC News
The discovery of fossilized remains belonging to the world’s largest snake has been reported in Nature journal.
Titanoboa was 13 m (42 ft) long - about the length of a bus - and lived in the rainforest of north-east Colombia 58-60 million years ago.
The snake was so wide it would have reached up to a person’s hips, say researchers, who have estimated that it weighed more than a ton.
Green anacondas - the world’s heaviest snakes - reach a mere 250 kg (550 lbs).
“Snakes had the opportunity to evolve and grow as big as this one did in a way that they probably wouldn’t today”
P David Polly, Indiana University
Reticulated pythons - the world’s longest snakes - can reach up to 10 m (32 ft).
The team of researchers led by Jason Head, from the University of Toronto at Mississauga, Canada, used a known mathematical relationship between the size of vertebrae and the length of the body in living snakes to estimate the size of the ancient animal.
Named Titanoboa cerrejonensis by its discoverers, the beast’s 13 meter-long body and 1,140 kg (2,500 lb) weight make it the largest snake on record.
“At its greatest width, the snake would have come up to about your hips. The size is pretty amazing,” said co-author P. David Polly, from Indiana University in Bloomington, US.
Researchers discovered fossilized bones belonging to the super-sized slitherers and their possible prey at Cerrejon, one of the world’s largest open-pit coal mines. The animal is a relative of modern boa constrictors.
Warming world
“Probably like an anaconda, it spent a lot of time in the water,” said Professor Polly.
“It would have needed to eat a lot. What its prey was exactly, we don’t know. But it probably included alligators, big fish or crocodiles.”
The researchers also used the reptile’s size to make an estimate of Earth’s temperature 58 to 60 million years ago in tropical South America.
Paleontologists have long known that as temperatures go up and down over geological time, generally speaking, so does the upper size limit of cold-blooded creatures - or poikilotherms.
This is because the metabolism of a poikilotherm is more or less controlled by the average temperature of its environment.
Assuming the Earth today was not particularly unusual, the researchers calculated that a snake of Titanoboa’s size would have required an average annual temperature of 30 C to 34 C (86 F to 93 F) to survive.
By comparison, the average yearly temperature of today’s Cartagena, a Colombian coastal city, is about 28 C.
Opportunity knocks
“A snake living in the tropics would have been operating at a much higher metabolic rate,” said Professor Polly.
“So snakes had the opportunity to evolve and grow as big as this one did in a way that they probably wouldn’t today.”
He added that as the Earth warmed up in future, cold-blooded animals could be expected to evolve larger bodies.
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