TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — A lone vertebra dug from Tainan’s coastal mudflats has unveiled giant pythons that once slithered through the nation’s prehistoric wetlands, reaching nearly 4 meters long before vanishing in a cascade of extinctions 400,000 years ago.
A Nautilus magazine report on Monday said researchers at National Taiwan University found the fossil in the Chiting Formation, a fossil-rich stretch of Tainan City’s southern plains. Dating to the Middle Pleistocene, 800,000 to 400,000 years ago, the specimen marks Taiwan’s first confirmed python bone, identified by its distinctive wedge-shaped zygosphene (wedge-shaped bony projection on the front of a snake’s vertebra).
Nautilus detailed how 3D modeling revealed the snake’s massive size, dwarfing Taiwan’s modern species.
In those ancient times, Tainan’s shores teemed with predators, from sabre-toothed cats to megacrocodiles amid megaherbivores like stegodons and rhinos. These pythons likely ambushed prey in lush wetlands, filling a top constrictor role now absent from Taiwan’s 50-plus snake species, the five researchers responsible for the original report wrote.
“This fossil represents the largest and most unexpected fossil snake from Taiwan,” the researchers were quoted as saying in their Historical Biology report, which was published online in mid-January, and titled, “An unexpected snake fossil (Pythonidae, Python) from Taiwan.”
Pleistocene upheavals ended the giant snakes, as glacial cycles cooled climates, shrank habitats and triggered trophic cascades wiping out prey across Taiwan. No large constrictors returned, reshaping Taiwan’s biodiversity long before humans, per Nautilus analysis.
The researchers said the Tainan find rewrites local prehistory and appears to show that Taiwan missed out on having apex predators in modern times, except perhaps raptors:
“We propose that the niche of top predators in the modern ecosystem may have been vacant since the Pleistocene extinction.”
Today, Tainan’s Chiting Formation draws paleontologists sifting for more relics amid salt flats and shrimp ponds. The discovery shows how global extinctions rippled through isolated islands like Taiwan.
Though the python appears to have been extinct for millennia in Taiwan there have over the years been sightings and the occasional capture of escaped Burmese pythons. A 1.7-meter Burmese python was discovered at a Changhua laundromat in 2024, while a 3-meter specimen was captured in Miaoli in 2020 — both suspected pets.
