Last month, an international group of scientists revealed in the journal Nature that Jaramillo’s team had made a startling discovery — a species of snake larger than a school bus that ruled northern South America 60 million years ago. Evolving after the extinction of the dinosaurs, Titanoboa cerrejonensis — or titanic boa from Cerrejon — might have been the largest vertebrate living on land at that time, the Paleocene era.