Prediction: This will turn out to be untrue. I'll tell you why.

If the snake were as large as stated, it would be half again as long, and twice as heavy as any snake previously verified to have been. Not likely, based on everything I read as a kid working in a pet shop, and devouring all the literature I could find on the matter. There was for many years a big cash prize for the first person to bring in a snake over thirty feet.

Second, some of the other stuff in the story smells to high heaven. According to <link to="www.guardian.co.uk" text="this report" target="none" %>the keeper, the snake was over twelve feet longer when it was captured, but they had to cut out a section of the snake as it had a "rotten deer" in it.

Yeahright. Pythons only eat live food, and their digestive acids can melt bones. This keeper ain't gaining no credibility points with me. He probably has a good career ahead of him in politics, though.

And if they know some way to cut four meters of spine from a vertebrate, and stick it back together, I know some medical folks over here in the States that wanna talk to them real quick-like.

Finally, the pics shown do show one big honker of a python, but it doesn't look all that much bigger than the ones I've seen. It may be at the record, or slightly over it, but it ain't no fifty feet long.

I'll make book on that. :-)

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