We all knew that Paul Rosolie didn't die — he has, after all, given media interviews in recent days. But just how did his attempt at getting "eaten alive" by a mega-anaconda turn out? 
 
 Viewers of Discovery Channel's Sunday night special, appropriately titled Eaten Alive, were treated to footage of how it all went down. 
 
 "The Amazon is the greatest natural battlefield on Earth. Everything, from the biggest tree to the smallest ant, is going to be eaten," Rosolie says near the beginning of the two-hour special. 
 
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 Of the anaconda, he says it's "the most terrifying species in the Amazon. We're dealing with power that's very difficult to even imagine, and I'm going to be in search of one individual snake that I know could be the largest snake on the planet." 
 
 He explains that the reason he wanted to perform the stunt — in which the strategy was to find the serpent, entice it to eat him and hope that he could either be pulled out once the snake had ingested him up to waist level, or perhaps startle the snake into regurgitating him — was to draw attention to the ecological crisis currently threatening the West Amazon from mining, illegal logging and rapid deforestation. 
 
 His journey takes him to a remote part of the Amazon called the Floating Forest, where he is in search of an anaconda he encountered years ago that he believes is the largest on Earth, surpassing a previously caught anaconda that measured at 24 feet, 7 inches. On his first encounter, he jumped on the snake's back, only to be dragged into the water and forced to jump off to save his life. 
 
 A good portion of the special is spent following Rosolie and his team as they track the anaconda. Once found, the serpent proves elusive. Rosolie sees it in the murky water and dives after it. He says it's at least 25 feet long. 
 
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 Using nighttime surveillance, since the giant snakes are hard to spot during the day, the team decides to go after the snake when it's out hunting at night for prey. In another attempt to capture it, Rosolio grabs its tail but can't keep hold: "I felt myself getting ripped off my feet, holding the tail of a snake that felt like it was a team of horses. I came out, and I was absolutely shaking." 
 
 It's too dangerous to continue searching for that particular snake, as the rainy season has now arrived. After securing a smaller anaconda, Rosolie puts on a one-of-a-kind suit soaked "head to toe in pig's blood, so I really smell like dinner to this animal," he explains. 
 
 The snake does, in fact, take the bait. It coils around Rosolie and eventually renders him unable to move. At one point, he says he cannot feel his arms at all and is unable to move as he struggles to turn his body. His heart rate soars above 180. 
 
 Then the snake looks as if it's going to eat him. It opens its jaws onto his helmet, but then Rosolie says his arm feels like it's about to break, and he calls the whole thing off before being rescued. 
 
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 Later he explains: "I felt her jaws lock onto my helmet. I felt her gurgling and wheezing, but then I felt her let go. She got my arm into a position where her force was fully on my exposed arm. I started to feel the blood drain out of my hand, and I felt the bone flex. And when I got to the point where I felt like it was going to snap, I had to tap out." 
 
 He adds that if he hadn't had the suit, "my ribcage would have lasted 10 seconds at best." Now that he knows the suit will protect him, "I'm ready to take this to a real giant," he says, adding that he plans to continue searching for the one that got away. 
 
 As for the snake? It was unharmed and released back into the environment. ||||| Eaten Alive's Paul Rosolie: The Snake Is 'Absolutely Fine' 
 
 It probably should have been called Squeezed Alive.That's because Sunday's Discovery special Eaten Alive – which led viewers to believe that naturalist Paul Rosolie was going to get swallowed by a massive anaconda – never even got to the appetizer stage.At worst, Rosolie nearly got the breath squeezed out of him before he called uncle and his team rushed out to save him. Never once did the 20-foot, 250 lb. anaconda ever swallow – much less bite the bejesus out of – Rosolie.And get this: that wasn't a snake that Rosolie and his team happened upon during filming. Reached by PEOPLE on Sunday, Rosolie admitted that the production actually relied upon a Peruvian green anaconda in captivity to complete the experiment."We didn't want to stress out a snake and then release her to the wild," explains Rosolie. "We wanted to be able to check her out, make sure she was okay. We kept in touch with her keeper for weeks afterwards to make sure she was alive and back to normal. We wanted to keep the suspense but really, it wasn't that big of a deal for the snake. But people have been drawing such crazy conclusions, we let them wonder."So did the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals get their panties in a bunch for nothing? Heck no, admits Rosolie."PETA promoted the hell out of it," said Rosolie of PETA, which initially slammed the special by suggesting the snake was probably "tormented" for ratings. "They helped me out a lot."In response, PETA senior vice president Lisa Lange said in a statement: "The animals were removed from their water habitat and transported to a filming location, and the chosen snake was deceived into using her precious energy reserves to constrict a human being pretending to be a pig, all for a publicity stunt. … Study after study has shown that entertainment features such as this one that show humans interfering with and handling wild animals are detrimental to species conservation. Rosolie knows this. Discovery knows this. Yet they chose to contrive and air this shameful stunt for ratings anyway." ||||| Herpetologist, naturalist and author Paul Rosolie is just 30, but his experiences while living and working in the forests of Peru’s remote Madre de Dios region could fill many volumes. Rosolie suffered a jaguar panting down his neck and survived a deadly infection while alone for days in the wilderness. He raised a baby anteater, foiled gun-toting poachers trafficking endangered species and wrestled enormous reptiles as he gathered data on them. 
 
 It's hard, however, to top his latest project: being eaten alive by a giant green anaconda, which is the largest and most powerful snake in the world. The snake was completely unharmed, and although Rosolie wore a protective suit, he wound up battered and bruised. Now healed, Rosolie shared thoughts about the encounter and some of his other adventures in the western Amazon. 
 
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 This wasn’t your first close encounter with an anaconda. What happened during those earlier encounters? 
 
 Rosolie: In order to study snakes that are anywhere from 15 to over 25 feet long, you have to catch them from behind the head to measure and weigh them. During one expedition, with only myself and another individual present, we encountered an enormous anaconda that weighed about 350 pounds. 
 
 I have a 6-foot arm span, so I jumped on the snake when I couldn’t wrap my arms around it. It kept slithering and moving rapidly, so I wound up riding on the snake while it wanted to dive under water, with me nearly going down with the anaconda. It was an overwhelming experience. 
 
 This happened in a newly discovered ecosystem called a floating forest. The discovery helped me to realize the importance of such huge apex predators. When their population decreases, everything else can suffer too. 
 
 Conservation of this region is essential. Consider that one-fifth of the planet’s oxygen is produced by the Amazon rainforest. Nearly half of the world's species will be destroyed or severely threatened over the next quarter century due to rainforest deforestation. We need to act now to save the Amazon rainforest. My colleagues and I have focused on the Madre de Dios region, where the Amazon River begins. 
 
 What gave you the idea to create and work on the “Eaten Alive” project? What do you say to critics who question why you, as a naturalist, would do something so outrageous? 
 
 Rosolie: The huge loss of biodiversity in the region cannot continue. We need to call attention to an area that a lot of people don’t even know or think about. 
 
 Snakes regurgitate all of the time. It’s a common behavioral response. There are also accounts of anacondas eating humans. The father of the cook who tours with us in the Amazon was eaten by an anaconda, so it’s not a myth. Anacondas eat prey that is much bigger and heavier than a human. 
 
 When you’re in a small village and your mother gets eaten by an anaconda, no cameras are running. You don’t call the press. In our project, we explored the possibility. We kept it within the parameters of a normal day in the wild. A snake did lose its lunch: me. ||||| Eaten Alive failed to show anyone being eaten alive! Credit: Discovery 
 
 It was billed as the one of the most amazing animal stunts ever to be seen on TV, but as viewers tuned in to watch Discovery's Eaten Alive special, there was disappointment ahead. 
 
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 Naturalist Paul Rosolie donned a protective outfit which he claimed would enable him to be eaten alive by an enormous anaconda snake, without being killed. But after a lengthy search for a suitable creature, Rosolie called time on the stunt after only his head had been consumed by the reptile, and Twitter exploded with disappointment. 
 
 The Amazon conservationist wore a carbon-fiber suit, to protect him from the snake's potentially heart-stopping constriction. Viewers watched as the snake bit his helmet. But before Rosolie could go any further into the snakes stomach (the promise of which had created outrage amongst animal rights activists), he called his security team to get the animal off him. 
 
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 “I'm calling it, I need help!” he screamed as he felt his arm starting to break. There was no second attempt, and the animal was released back into the wild. 
 
 “I started to feel the blood drain out of my hand and I felt the bone flex," Rosolie explained, after his attempt. "And when I got to the point where I felt like it was going to snap I had to tap out,” he said. 
 
 Within minutes of the show airing, Twitter erupted with viewer disappointment, many of whom likened the stunt to The Mysteries of Al Capone's Vaults in 1986, where a TV special watched by 30 million viewers promised a look into the Chicago hotel vault where the famous gangster kept some of his wealth. In the end, the show, presented by Geraldo Rivera, revealed a vault containing nothing but a load of dust and some empty Coke bottles. 
 
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 "Geraldo prob just watched #EatenAlive and high-fived himself. His 'Al Capone's vault' special is no longer the biggest letdown in TV history," one Twitter user wrote. 
 
 "Calling it #EatenAlive is like having a show on the Food Network about cooking a turkey and all they do after 2 hours is preheat the oven," added another. 
 
 "The eaten alive guy didn't get eaten alive... #Disappointed," another tweeter summed up. 
 
 In response to the complaints, Rosolie has claimed that he carried out the risky move in a bid to raise money to save the snake's habitat in South America, and that the animal was not harmed. 
 
 "I wanted to do something to grab people’s attention to the plight of the disappearing rainforests, something completely crazy," he said earlier this month. "Everything else has been tried." 
 
 Tell Us: Was Eaten Alive a big con or was it worth a watch?
– Eaten Alive, the Discovery Channel special that was supposed to feature Paul Rosolie being swallowed whole, then regurgitated, by an anaconda, aired last night ... but Rosolie's encounter with the giant snake didn't exactly go down as planned. According to the Hollywood Reporter, Rosolie spent most of the two-hour special searching for an anaconda he first saw years ago, one he believes to be the biggest on Earth at at least 25 feet. In his first on-camera encounter with the snake, he jumped on its back but had to jump off when he was dragged into the water. After another encounter during which Rosolie grabbed its tail but couldn't hang on, he determined it would be safer to settle for a smaller anaconda. He put on his pig-blood-soaked protective suit, and the snake (a 20-footer that was already in captivity, according to People) coiled around him. Then, just as the snake opened its jaws onto Rosolie's helmet, he called the whole thing off and was rescued. "I felt her jaws lock onto my helmet," he explained afterward. "I felt her gurgling and wheezing but then I felt her let go. She got my arm into a position where her force was fully on my exposed arm. I started to feel the blood drain out of my hand and I felt the bone flex, and when I got to the point where I felt like it was going to snap I had to tap out." He says he couldn't move and, at one point, couldn't feel his arms; his heart rate went higher than 180. Twitter exploded with complaints after Rosolie called off the stunt, Us reports, with one viewer noting, "Calling it #EatenAlive is like having a show on the Food Network about cooking a turkey and all they do after 2 hours is preheat the oven." But Rosolie says he accomplished what he set out to—being eaten alive was just the hook, he explains. "I wanted to do something to grab people’s attention to the plight of the disappearing rainforests," he explained earlier this month. "Something completely crazy." And, yes, the snake is fine; as for Rosolie, he was "pretty beaten up," he tells Discovery. (Read about the controversy that swirled around the special.)