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.
