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Fossils reveal anacondas have been giants for over 12 million years
Study: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02724634.2025.2572967 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02724634.2025.2...
- ChrisArchitect 11mo agoCambridge source: https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/twelve-million-years-of-giant-anacondas https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/twelve-million-years-of-giant-...
- tomhow 10mo agoThanks, we updated the link.
- redwood 10mo agoI'll never forget the Palo Anaconda scare. Update: it was a black mamba scare, oops https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2023/10/10/palo-alto-residents-reminisce-about-30-year-old-black-mamba-scare/ https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2023/10/10/palo-alto-res...
- markus_zhang 10mo agoI wonder why even looking at pictures of giant snakes is unsettling. And cockroaches too.
- andai 10mo agoCause your nervous system knows what a snake is but doesn't know what a picture is?
- iberator 10mo agoIt is proven by science that there is no such thing as an intuitive fear of snakes. Its 100% cultural. Toddlers don't fear snakes for example.
- nxpnsv 10mo agoIs culture how cats and cucumbers work?
- fainpul 10mo agoNo, that's how surprise works. As in "Cop scared by mannequin": https://youtu.be/xf1Y2En4fGE?si=2RwRnGBoGHuCNogG&t=416 https://youtu.be/xf1Y2En4fGE?si=2RwRnGBoGHuCNogG&t=416
- suzzer99 10mo agoWhat about spiders?
- abc_lisper 10mo agoReference?
- pavel_lishin 10mo agohttps://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6716607/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6716607/
- defrost 10mo agoI'm aligned with @iberator here. I grew up with children and people in Northern Australia that had zero fear of snakes and spiders with plenty of exposure to both. When I was 13 a friend of my sister, a large imposing Torres Strait Islander girl, visited and saw a cat for the very first time and screamed fit to break glass while jumping back to break the wall panel and up onto the couch. This was someone comfortable handling large live mud crabs on the floor, gutting fish, handling snakes and killing them, etc.
- csallen 10mo agoI've always found this interesting because nothing about the appearance of a snake has ever bothered me, unsettled me, or made me fearful. They actually look very neat to me, and the tiny snakes I've had the fortune of holding were very fun to feel slithering about in my hands. Cockroaches on the hand, not scary at all, but I feel disgusted by them. And large spiders, extremely scary to me, instant fear response.
- sebmellen 10mo agoIt's the exact same for me. The spiders are by far the most visceral fear response, especially if a gruesomely detailed photo pops up on my phone. Smaller spiders scared me when I was younger, but I have overcome that phobia significantly. Large, hairy, distinctly arthropodic spiders, though...? Yuck.
- anon_cow1111 10mo agoQuestion for both you and GPP; is this fear limited to real life depictions, or basically anything? E.g, if you ever played Skyrim or a game with spider-like enemies does it have the same effect as a real spider? Answers I've seen to this question tend to vary wildly.
- hacb 10mo agoI'm also really afraid of snakes, but spiders are okay. Movies with snakes are quite painful to watch too, and I'm very uncomfortable with snakes in video games, but at least I have some control (compared to TV) so it's a significantly better experience
- t-3 10mo agoSpider-fear has never been triggered by fictional spiders for me. Very few works ever bother getting the face and body right though. 8 legs alone are not scary for me, the fangs and eyes and color patterns and the sneaky movement and webs are scary. I'm not terribly afraid of real spiders though. Hairy crawling spiders like wolf spiders and tarantulas don't really bother me at all. It's the ones with the big web-spinning butts that dangle and drop down from above that make me go straight into fight-or-flight.
- meindnoch 10mo agoI'm not unsettled by them.
- 47282847 10mo agoThere is the theory that a substantive percentage of people have dangerous prenatal experiences with their umbilical chord, as the source of their fear of snakes, and that it can be resolved later in life with regressive therapy. See e.g. ”Womb Surround” by Ray Castellino.
- pavel_lishin 10mo agoWouldn't those people also be afraid of ropes, cables, etc?
- 47282847 10mo agoI think the idea is that an umbilical cord is experienced as “alive” whereas ropes are just “dead items”, something that in early years may trigger the original fear responses but gets integrated more easily.
- binaryturtle 10mo ago"Error 403 Forbidden" I guess that's this new UK laws in effect? How can I prove I'm old enough to watch some giant snakes? :)
- Normal_gaussian 10mo agoThere is no age gating on this content.
- fartfeatures 10mo agoSome sites geoblock the UK because of our less than sensible laws e.g. imgur.
- binaryturtle 10mo agoI'm not even from the UK (EU here). The following is what I'm seeing exactly, and because it still happens it seems deliberate, not a temporary issue where I was "snake-joking" about earlier. Well… no cute snakes for me. --- Error 403 Forbidden Forbidden Error 54113 Details: cache-fra-etou8220097-FRA 1765473610 1384447547 Varnish cache server
- gsf_emergency_6 10mo agoAnacondas can & will eat anything that moves, that's a evolutionary feedback loop, but I hesitate to call it positive
- xeonmc 10mo agoAh, so buns means movement.
- gsf_emergency_6 10mo agoIt's commonly hoped that pet anacondas that have been with you all their lives should be more circumspect, but experts say otherwise
- chiefalchemist 10mo ago> Global changes have since driven many other giant animals to extinction, but anacondas grow just as big today. But why? Why have anacondas - and sharks? - been immune to evolving? Why hasn’t a significant predator evolved - or invaded? - to feed on them? Why hasn’t 12 million years made the species fragile?
- meindnoch 10mo agoThey've reached a local maximum.
- adolph 10mo agoThis comment seems to be generating downvotes, but I find the questions fascinating. It is a stretch to say the fossil record rules out any evolutionary changes to anacondas. However, if anacondas represent another form of so-called "living fossils" [0], it is interesting to think about what makes them resistant to the change that seems to occur as a matter of course in many other organisms? 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_fossil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_fossil
- chiefalchemist 10mo agoIt was my comment. Thanks, cause I see plenty of NH treads that go completely off topic and there are too few down votes for that. In any case, 12M years a long time for a species to survive, let alone survive “as is”. It makes me think of the creature in Alien and how it evolved into deadly perfection. But these creatures aren’t fictional. p.s. Aren’t octopuses another species of little to no change? But they’re weird anyway so it’s not a surprise?
- adolph 10mo agoOctopuses are all soft tissue (except for their "beak"), so it would be very hard to determine from the fossil record how much change has occurred. Perhaps as a result, they are not mentioned in the "living fossil" article above. An additional complication is that some cephalopods have a relatively unique ability to change gene expression in response to environmental factors [0]. As a result, even if one were to see physiological change or change in ecological niche, it might not be as a result of speciation. Hopefuly soon techniques of analyzing ancient DNA [1] will be more broadly used to understand the stories of long surviving species. 0. https://www.nsf.gov/news/masters-acclimation-octopuses-adjust-cold-editing https://www.nsf.gov/news/masters-acclimation-octopuses-adjus... 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_DNA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_DNA
- buserror 10mo agoAt last, something that isn't about python! :>
- amelius 10mo agoanaconda is a package manager for python sorry ...
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]