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May 27, 2014
What weighs as much as 14 African elephants and is longer than four buses placed end-to-end? The largest creature ever to have walked the Earth, according to scientists who have been examining newly discovered dinosaur remains in Argentina. A farm worker stumbled across the gigantic fossilized bones near La Flecha in the Patagonian desert. Now paleontologists have announced their conclusions.
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What weighs as much as 14 African elephants and is longer than four buses placed end-to-end? The largest creature ever to have walked the Earth, according to scientists who have been examining newly discovered dinosaur remains in Argentina.
A farm worker stumbled across the gigantic fossilized bones near La Flecha in the Patagonian desert. Now paleontologists have announced their conclusions.
They measured the length and circumference of the largest femur (thigh bone), to calculate that the animal weighed 77 metric tons. That makes it the biggest dinosaur yet, seven metric tons heavier than the last to hold the record, Argentinosaurus, also discovered in Argentina, in 1987.
The latest fossils were unearthed by a team from Argentina’s Museum of Paleontology Egidio Feruglio, led by Dr. Jose Luis Carballido and Dr. Diego Pol.
“Given the size of these bones, which surpass any of the previously known giant animals, the new dinosaur is the largest animal known that walked on Earth,” the scientists told the BBC. “Its length, from its head to the tip of its tail, was 40m. Standing with its neck up, it was about 20m high – equal to a seven-story building.”
They excavated the partial skeletons of seven individual dinosaurs – about 150 bones in total – and said they were all in “remarkable condition.”
The team believes the bones come from a new species of titanosaur, a sub-group of the long-necked herbivorous sauropods that roamed the world’s forests about 100 million years ago during what is known as the Late Cretaceous period. Argentinosaurus is from the same group, as is the smaller diplodocus.
But the latest discovery has yet to be given a name. “It will be named describing its magnificence and in honor to both the region and the farm owners who alerted us about the discovery,” the research team said.
Because complete skeletons have not been discovered, the actual size of the animal can only be estimated.
Argentinosaurus was first thought to weigh 100 metric tons but the figure was later revised down to about 70 metric tons – making it smaller than the latest discovery. This time the scientists are more confident of the size owing to the large number of bones found.
But Dr. Paul Barrett, a dinosaur expert from London’s Natural History Museum, noted: “There are a number of similarly sized big sauropod thigh bones out there.
“Without knowing more about this current find it’s difficult to be sure. One problem with assessing the weight of both Argentinosaurus and this new discovery is that they’re both based on very fragmentary specimens – no complete skeleton is known, which means the animal’s proportions and overall shape are conjectural.”
