A colossal prehistoric snake, Vasuki indicus, may have rivaled the largest snakes in history, stretching up to 50 feet long. Fossils from India suggest it was a slow-moving ambush predator and part of a widespread ancient snake lineage.
Credit: AI/ScienceDaily.com.
An open access paper published in Scientific Reports in 2024 describes an astonishing giant snake from India which, in life, may have reached up to about 50 feet in length. Ignoring, for the moment, the inconvenient age of the fossils, its existence bears an eerie superficial resemblance to the mythical Hindu serpent king, Vasuki.
Imagine the unbounded joy and celebration there would be if creationists were finally presented with fossil evidence that appeared to confirm one of their favourite myths, giving them something more tangible than the written-down stories of Bronze Age pastoralists.
Strangely, though, there have been no such celebrations over evidence which, superficially at least, appears to echo Hindu mythology. It is almost as though creationists understand perfectly well that religious myths are just that — myths — and that any evidence which appears to support someone else’s mythology can be dismissed without a second thought. Unless, of course, it happens to be their own mythology, in which case coincidence, metaphor and wishful thinking are suddenly promoted to “evidence”.
Named by its discoverers Vasuki indicus, the snake is estimated to have been between about 11 and 15 metres long, making it one of the largest snakes ever known. The genus name comes from Vasuki, the great serpent king of Hindu mythology, often depicted coiled around the neck of Shiva. Vasuki is one of the mythological nāgas associated with serpent worship, including the Hindu festival of Naga Panchami.
However, as a supposed source of the Vasuki myth, there is one small snag: Vasuki indicus lived about 47 million years ago, in the early Middle Eocene, a mere 19 million years after the end-Cretaceous mass extinction that ended the reign of the non-avian dinosaurs. That is long before humans, long before language, long before writing, and long before any culture capable of inventing and transmitting religious mythology existed. Like all religious mythology, the stories of Vasuki arose much later in human history — not in the Eocene swamps of India, and certainly not as a folk memory of a snake that had vanished tens of millions of years before there were any people to remember it.
The fossil vertebrae of Vasuki indicus were discovered in the Panandhro Lignite Mine in Kutch, Gujarat State, western India, and described by Debajit Datta and Sunil Bajpai of the Department of Earth Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Uttarakhand, India. The remains consist of 27 mostly well-preserved vertebrae, some still articulated, from what appears to have been a fully grown animal. The authors identify it as a member of the extinct madtsoiid snake family and suggest that it represents a distinctive Indian lineage of large-bodied snakes. ([EurekAlert!][2])
The accompanying Springer Nature news release, reproduced by EurekAlert!, is available here. The original Springer Nature press release is accessible to accredited journalists only.
Vasuki, the Serpent King of Hindu Mythology. Vasuki, or Vāsuki, is one of the great nāgas — the semi-divine serpent beings of Indian religious mythology. In Hindu tradition he is commonly described as a serpent king, or nāgarāja, and is closely associated with Shiva, one of the major deities of Hinduism. In many depictions, Vasuki is shown coiled around Shiva’s neck, where the serpent becomes a symbol of power, danger mastered, and divine control over death and fear.
Vasuki also plays a famous role in the myth of the Samudra Manthana, the “Churning of the Ocean of Milk”. In that story, the gods and anti-gods, or devas and asuras, seek amrita, the nectar of immortality. Mount Mandara is used as the churning rod, while Vasuki is used as the living rope wound around it. As the two sides pull back and forth, the cosmic ocean is churned and various miraculous substances emerge, including the deadly poison halahala, which Shiva consumes to save creation. [1]
The name chosen for the fossil snake, Vasuki indicus, is therefore a deliberate reference to one of the most powerful serpent figures in Hindu mythology. The comparison is poetic rather than historical: the fossil snake lived about 47 million years ago, tens of millions of years before humans, language, writing or religion existed. The name reflects the animal’s immense size and Indian origin, not any real connection between the extinct Eocene snake and the much later mythology of ancient India.
This makes Vasuki indicus a good example of how scientists often use mythology, literature or local culture when naming newly discovered species, while still keeping the science firmly grounded in evidence. The mythological Vasuki belongs to the world of human imagination; the fossil Vasuki belongs to the deep-time history of life on Earth.
Palaeontology: Discovery of new ancient giant snake in India
A new ancient species of snake dubbed Vasuki Indicus, which lived around 47 million years ago in the state of Gujarat in India, may have been one of the largest snakes to have ever lived, suggests new research published in Scientific Reports. The new species, which reached an estimated length of between 11 and 15 metres, was part of the now extinct madtsoiidae snake family, but represented a distinct lineage that originated in India.
Debajit Datta and Sunil Bajpai describe a new specimen recovered from the Panandhro Lignite Mine, Kutch, Gujarat State, India, which dates to the Middle Eocene period, approximately 47 million years ago. The new species is named Vasuki indicus after the mythical snake round the neck of the Hindu deity Shiva and in reference to its country of discovery, India. The authors describe 27 mostly well-preserved vertebra, some of which are articulated, which appear to be from a fully-grown animal.
The vertebrae measure between 37.5 and 62.7 millimetres in length and 62.4 and 111.4 millimetres in width, suggesting a broad, cylindrical body. Extrapolating from this, the authors estimate that V. indicus may have reached between 10.9 and 15.2 metres in length. This is comparable in size to the longest known snake to have ever lived, the extinct Titanoboa, although the authors highlight the uncertainty around these estimates. They further speculate that V. indicus’s large size made it a slow-moving, ambush predator akin to an anaconda.
The authors identify V. indicus as belonging to the madtsoiidae family, which existed for around 100 million years from the Late Cretaceous to the Late Pleistocene and lived in a broad geographical range including Africa, Europe, and India. They suggest that V. indicus represents a lineage of large madtsoiids that originated in the Indian subcontinent and spread via southern Europe to Africa during the Eocene, approximately 56 to 34 million years ago.
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