Were there giant snakes during dinosaur times?

anyone know???

The answer to this and a lot of other interesting questions about snakes may be found in the following book:

Ernst, Carl H. and George R. Zug 1996 Snakes in question : the Smithsonian answer book. Washington, DC : Smithsonian Institution Press.

A good book on snakes is probably your best bet. But I don't have one. The answer seems to be Yes, based on a paper in Nature: 'The Origin of snake Feeding' (12 August 99, p 655-659) The paper is primarily on jaw evolution, and sees snakes and mososaurs as comming from a common mososaur-like ancestor. Mososaurs were medium to very large marine reptiles, evolved from lizards like monitors and iguanas. They were much more common than snakes, and have a much better fossil record in the Cretaceous. The earliest snakes may well have been large marine predators. (and they still had hind limbs, eg _Pachyrhachis_, 'found with a large fish in its gut'.) In the Cretaceous, the last great dinosaur time.

BTW, have there been any recent finds of early mososaurs?

next year a book is coming out from the INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS that might help answer this question

FOSSIL SNAKES OF NORTH AMERICA, origin, distribution, paleoecology by J. Alan Holman

-Betty Cunningham

I may add that Holman is an authority on N. American fossil snakes but I do believe that most of the giants are found in the Old World, where snakes seemed to have originated. Hence the book that I mentioned, which did, IIRC deal with the subject of fossil snakes, may be the better source. Since I don't have the book in front of me, I can't give the answer to that question directly although I seem to remember that there were once really large fossil snakes.

That book is written by two veteran American herpetologists, giants in their field in fact, if you pardon the pun. The book, again, is:

Ernst, Carl H. and George R. Zug 1996 Snakes in question : the Smithsonian answer book. Washington, DC : Smithsonian Institution Press.

It is written for the laymen primarily, although biologists who do not specialize in herpetology will find it a rich and fascinating source of information about a much maligned and misunderstood group of vertebrates.