Massive New Dinosaur Might be the Largest Creature to Ever Roam Earth
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:
Massive new dinosaur might be the largest creature to ever roam Earth:
The remains of the unnamed dinosaur were first discovered in 2012 in Neuquen Province of northwest Patagonia, but have still not been fully excavated.
[...] "Given the measurements of the new skeleton, it looks likely that this is a contender for one of the largest, if not the largest, sauropods that have ever been found," Paul Barrett, a paleobiologist at the Natural History Museum in London who was not involved in the study, told Live Science.
[...] "The place of the finding is very hard to access, so the logistics is pretty complicated," lead study author Alejandro Otero, a paleontologist at La Plata Museum in Argentina, told Live Science. "But we expect to return there after the pandemic situation."
The remains themselves date to about 98 million years ago, meaning the creature lived during the Cretaceous period.
[...] Right now, the researchers can't say how large the new titanosaur was, given that the long limb bones used to make such estimates, such as the humerus and femur, have not yet been excavated. However, analyses of the bones that have been found - including 24 vertebrae of the tail and parts of the pelvic and pectoral girdle - show that it was most likely the largest of the titanosaurs.
[...] "It is a huge dinosaur, but we expect to find much more of the skeleton in future field trips, so we'll have the possibility to address with confidence how big it really was," Otero said.
Journal Reference:
Alejandro Otero, Jose L. Carballido, Leonardo Salgado et al. Report of a giant titanosaur sauropod from the Upper Cretaceous of Neuquen Province, Argentina, Cretaceous Research (DOI: 10.1016/j.cretres.2021.104754)
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.