Coastal taipan In his book "Venom", which explores the development of a taipan antivenom in Australia in the 1940s and 1950s, author Brendan James Murray argues that only one person is known to have survived an "Oxyuranus" bite without antivenom: George Rosendale, a Guugu Yimithirr aboriginal bitten at Hope Vale in 1949. Murray writes that Rosendale's condition was so severe that nurses later showed him extracted samples of his own blood that were completely black in colour. Coastal taipan The coastal taipan ("Oxyuranus scutellatus"), or common taipan, is a species of large, extremely venomous snake in the family Elapidae. The species is
Coastal taipan being bitten, but the average is around 2.5 hours. The time between a bite and death depends on various factors such as the nature of the bite and the constitution of the victim. Untreated bites have a mortality rate of 100% as the coastal taipan always delivers a fatal dose of venom (an average bite delivers 10-12x the lethal dose of venom for a human adult male), and medical professionals recommend that victims seek immediate medical attention even for apparently minor bites. Before the introduction of specific antivenom by the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories in 1956, nearly all bites were fatal.