Something to think about when reading about new giant fossils.
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For many years we exhibited in this museum (then the Royal Scottish Museum, Edinburgh) a cast of the "poison-fang of the extinct giant serpent" Bothrodon pridei, with the following information: "The original of this unique fossil [in the Glagow University zoology museum] was obtained in a silt-like deposit of Pleistocene age in the Gran Chaco region of South America. The snake itself must have been an enormous animal, possibly about 100 feet in length, and may have fed on Megatherium and other slow cumbersome animals of the plains."
When it was discovered that the "poison-fang" was no more than a labial digitation of the seashell Lambis chiragra, the hypothetical snake was consigned to oblivion, but the taxon (which was based on the specimen and not on the concept) survived as a junior synonym of the gastropod!
David Heppell Curator of Mollusca National Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh
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