Thursday, October 28, 2010

How Long Is This Snake?

How Long Is This Snake?

The first part of the following video was shot by Thiago Benedito, of Luiz Antônio, São Paulo, Brazil. It was a chance shot with his cellphone camera.

A backhoe operator was dredging a canal to clean it. He put the bucket into the water, and lo and behold when he lifted it out of the water there was this gigantic, monster anaconda! Its body touched the ground on both sides even when the bucket was raised to its full height.

The second part of the video shows a picture that is said to have been circulating in Brazil since the 1960s. The anaconda was reportedly measured at over 12 meters (over 3 meters longer than the accepted world record for the length of a snake.)

An interesting thing about the second snake is the general geographical location that it was killed in.

It was killed in Mato Grosso, the same general geographical location that Colonel Percy Fawcett, a British soldier, claimed, in 1907, to have killed an anaconda of 62 feet (about 18 meters) in length. Colonel Percy Fawcett remains ridiculed to this day.