"It's a phobia, and people are fascinated by their fears."

A prehistoric snake that stretched about 48 feet long and weighed 2,500 pounds is slithering to a screen near you — and not in some fictional horror movie.

The snake, dubbed Titanoboa, is the star of a new Smithsonian Channel documentary airing locally on television this weekend. The documentary's human stars include Jonathan Bloch, a Florida Museum of Natural History vertebrate paleontologist and co-leader of the mission that discovered the snake's bones in a Colombian coal mine.

Titanoboa is believed to be the largest snake that ever lived, devouring giant crocodiles and turtles in the rain forest that existed around 60 million years ago on the mine site. Bloch said the snake was larger than anything even imagined by Hollywood — so large that today it would reach waist high on most people and barely be able to squeeze through a doorway.

Read more at the Gainesville Sun.