South America on Pitara Kids Network

The Snake with the Golden Teeth

Tue, 12 Dec 2000 06:38:56 +0000

There was once a man called Paolo Maria Encarnacao Esplendido. He lived at Manaos in Brazil. He was a very rich man. He owned two gold mines and a silver mine. You might think one got more money from a gold mine than a silver mine because gold is worth more than silver. But, as a matter of face, more money goes down gold mines than comes out of them, because people are always digging mines for gold in places where there isn’t enough to make it worth their while.

The Spectacled Bear

Sat, 03 Feb 2001 07:16:48 +0000

Many of us wear glasses when we have problems with eyesight. But, have you ever heard of bears with glasses? No, not the bears who appear on the Cartoon Network on TV. Real bears.

The spectacled bear [Illustration by Shridevi]

There is a kind of bear which lives in the forests of South America. It is called the ‘spectacled bear,’ or the Tremarctos Ornatus.

It has white coloured fur around its eyes, which makes it look like it is wearing glasses. Some of these bears have only the bottom half of their glasses, whereas in some others the eye rings are so thick that they completely fill up the face.

Fossil of Giant Snake Found in South America

Tue, 19 Jun 2007 16:27:29 +0000

Where: Cerrejon, Colombia

February 4, 2009 : ‘Nature’ journal reports that the snake, named ‘Titanoboa cerrejonensis’ by the scientists who found the remains, would have had a 13-metre-long body and weighed 1,140 kilograms, making it the largest snake on record. A mathematical ratio between the size of vertebrae and the length of the body in living snakes was used by the team to estimate the size. The world’s heaviest snakes, green anacondas, weigh only 250 kilograms, and the longest, reticulated pythons, measure 10 metres at the most. Titanboa would have been similar to a boa constrictor, and could have swallowed a whole cow. What its prey was has not been established, but it would have needed to eat a lot.