Jaramillo is a staff scientist with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. He and a team of scientists discovered a fossil of the world’s largest snake — a 48-foot, 2,500-pound reptile they called Titanoboa — in an open-pit coal mine at Cerrejon in Colombia. A life-size replica of the prehistoric creature is now on display for the first time at the National Museum of Natural History. What was the first clue that led to your discovery?
One of my students was taking a class in coal geology and part of the class was visiting that coal mine in Cerrejon. So we are talking about 11 years ago. … Part of the visit, they stopped in a pit and he found a small leaf in a piece of a rock. So he brought the leaf back to me and I realized, I mean, that we have a fantastic opportunity that the mine could be a gold mine in paleontology.
Did you think a creature like this ever existed?
No, no, no, no. Every time I see the model of the snake, it’s hard to imagine that such a big animal could exist and no, not in my wildest dreams. … It tells you how powerful nature is.
What does this discovery mean?
It told us a lot about the tropical rainforest — how the forest responds to different changes in climate. The reason this animal got so big is because the temperature of the tropics used to be higher than today because snakes, they cannot regulate the temperature of their internal body like we do.
What are you up to next?
Well, this mine is so big that they always are destroying places, but they are opening new places so we continue collecting there, looking for who knows what we’re going to find next.
