Television Review | 'Titanoboa: Monster Snake': ?Titanoboa: Monster Snake? on Smithsonian Channel

A spring warning for puttering-in-the-garden types who have occasionally been startled by a garter snake as they pull the weeds: Soon you may be seeing a cousin of that garter lolling in your flowerbed. This snake will be fairly easy to distinguish from the other. It?ll be the one that?s longer than your house.

Smithsonian Channel

Titanoboa: Monster Snake A rendering of the prehistoric serpent (and prey) on Smithsonian Channel, Sunday night at 8, Eastern and Pacific time; 7 Central time.

Breaking news about the arts, coverage of live events, critical reviews, multimedia and more.

A sortable calendar of noteworthy cultural events in the New York region, selected by Times critics.

?Titanoboa: Monster Snake,? coming Sunday on the Smithsonian Channel, suggests near the end of the program that we may not have seen the last of the incredibly large prehistoric serpent known as Titanoboa, or something like it. The program notes the correlation between snake size and temperature. In Britain, with a relatively mild climate, the biggest snake is about six feet long, while in the modern-day Amazon basin, anacondas might reach 25 feet. Throw in a little global warming, and suddenly those 25-footers could be runts.

Titanoboa, you see, was 48 feet long. People strolling through Grand Central Terminal the other day got a first-hand look at just how big that is, because the Smithsonian Channel had plunked a life-size model of the snake there as a promotional device. In the program, there?s a scene in which four researchers are struggling to hold onto an annoyed green anaconda in the wetlands of Venezuela that looks to be about 20 feet long.

?This is probably the size of a juvenile Titanoboa, maybe about a year old,? says Jonathan I. Bloch, one of those researchers. Oh.

Though the prospect of a Titanoboa-filled future makes for a delightful image to pass on to your grandchildren, the most interesting part of the program is the story of the discovery of the first Titanoboa fossils at a coal mine in Colombia and the dawning realization of just how big the snake was.

A Colombian graduate student first noticed a fossilized leaf at the mine in 2002, and researchers then began discovering a wealth of animal fossils there too, including, we?re told, ?turtles with shells the size of pool tables.?

Dr. Bloch, a curator at the Florida Museum of Natural History, was among those working the site. At his lab in Florida, a graduate student going through a box of crocodile bones found a colossal vertebrae that was from something other than a crocodile.

It was identified as coming from a snake, but one of a size never seen before. A fellow scientist advises Dr. Bloch in the program that if this snake were coming through his office door, it would have to squeeze through. Which is why, in a globally warmed future, all offices will need a second exit, just in case.

Titanoboa: Monster Snake

Smithsonian Channel, Sunday night at 8, Eastern and Pacific time; 7 Central time.

Produced by Smithsonian Channel, Wide-Eyed Entertainment, yap films and History Television Canada. David Royle and Charles Poe, executive producers for Smithsonian Channel.

WITH: Jonathan I. Bloch, Carlos Jaramillo and Jason Head.

occupy rose parade vesta williams stanford stanford oklahoma state university badgers badgers