Massive new dinosaur find may have been the largest one ever
Digital Reporter
Sunday, September 7, 2014, 2:12 PM -
[Thumbnail image credit: Jennifer Hall / Drexel]
Many dinosaurs were enormous, the dominant species on planet Earth for millions of years, so when a scientist calls Dreadnoughtus schrani "astoundingly huge," that's saying something.
The absurdly large dinosaur, excavated in Patagonia in southern Argentina, earns its name. The specimen is 26 m long, weighs 59 metric tonnes, and lead researcher Kenneth Lacovara says it's 70 per cent complete, making it unique among dinosaurs of similar size.
“It weighed as much as a dozen African elephants or more than seven T. rex," Lacovara, an associate professor at Drexel University, says in the university's feature on the find. "Shockingly, skeletal evidence shows that when this 65-ton specimen died, it was not yet full grown. It is by far the best example we have of any of the most giant creatures to ever walk the planet."
Lacovara says the beast may have been "the largest land animal for which a body mass can be accurately calculated.
This handy chart from Drexel gives you an idea of what that means in practice:
The name "dreadnoughtus," evokes power and size. Used to describe large battleships at the beginning of the 20th Century, Lacovara says he chose it for the beast for its literal latin meaning: "Fears nothing."
It roamed the forests of what is now Patagonia 77 million years ago. At its size, it's pretty likely it had no predators.
As for distributing the findings, prehistory meets the future in this case. The team scanned all the bones they found, and made a digital version of them that can be passed along and examined by other researchers around the world.
“This has the advantage that it doesn’t take physical space,” Lacovara says. “These images can be ported around the world to other scientists and museums. The fidelity is perfect. It doesn’t decay over time like bones do in a collection."
The group's findings were published in the journal Nature. You can read Drexel's full (and human readable) report here.
