Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology.
National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan.
The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said.
Photo courtesy of Tsai Cheng-hsiu
The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said.
Discoveries of apex predator fossils suggest the presence of a “fairly complex, well-established and stable ecosystem” during the Middle Pleistocene in Taiwan, it added.
No members of the python genus inhabit the main island today, with the Burmese python in Kinmen County the closest extant population, it said.
The largest snakes on Taiwan proper today are the king rat snake and the oriental rat snake, neither of which exceeds 3m in length.
As Taiwan has no living crocodile species, the snakes are the nation’s largest reptiles.
Tsai’s research previously described a giant crocodile measuring up to 7m long, which also lived during the Pleistocene alongside the large pythons.
The python fossil was donated to Tsai by private collector L.R. Hou (侯立仁) for research at the NTU laboratory of evolution and diversity of fossil vertebrates.
Tsai returned to Taiwan in 2018 to establish the lab and became the first Taiwanese to discover dinosaur fossils, finding the first Pleistocene bird specimen in 2021.
The paper, “An Unexpected Snake Fossil,” was published in Historical Biology in January.
It was coauthored by doctoral candidates Liao Yi-lu (廖翊如) and Cho Yi-yang (卓義揚), along with Sun Cheng-han (孫正涵) and Deep Shubhra Biswas from India.
The paper suggests that the modern ecosystem of Taiwan, which is devoid of top predators, might have yet to recover from the Pleistocene extinction event.
That also supports his hypothesis that large-scale extinction events occurred across island ecosystems worldwide, Tsai said, adding that local extinction events in Taiwan require further research.
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