What was the longest dinosaur in the world? It seems that we already have a winner. A paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London, Brian Curtice , claims that a diplodocid sauropod from the late Jurassic period is the longest dinosaur on record, measuring almost 42 meters long (like the Xishan Temple in southern China) from snout to nose. line.
This gigantic sauropod dinosaur would have walked the ancient lands of North America approximately 150 million years ago during the Jurassic period.
Their discovery was presented online this month at the annual conference of the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology and is pending peer review. If the results of this study are confirmed, the Supersaurus would be longer than any other known dinosaur, including the well-known Diplodocus, which could have reached a length of about 33 meters, according to a 2006 study by researchers from the University of Western Australia. .
There were not three, but one
Apparently, experts had confused the bones of the Supersaurus with those of three different dinosaurs, but according to Curtice, it is a unique and splendid animal. The expert thus claims to have corrected a misidentification made in the past by another researcher half a century ago.
The first Supersaurus bones were unearthed in the Dry Mesa Dinosaur Quarry in Colorado in 1972 by paleontologist James Jensen of Brigham Young University (United States). In 1985, Jensen published a study in the Great Basin Naturalist magazine announcing the discovery of three new sauropod dinosaurs from the quarry. However, Jensen was not a trained paleontologist and he made some mistakes with his analysis as, according to Curtice, his bones were wrongly identified and they all belong to a single Supersaurus. According to this expert, no two specimens of the same bone were found – no other excessively large sauropod bones were found nearby – all the remains were discovered in the same quarry and the large bones were all the same size, which increases the possibility of that it was a single dinosaur: the supersaurus.
“There is no duplication of large items,” Curtice wrote on his blog. “The scapulae, the sit bones and the pubis are all paired, one left and one right, each of the right size to be the other’s partner.”
According to the analysis and evaluations of the paleontologist, the Supersaurus neck would have measured almost 16 meters long and its tail an impressive figure of more than 18 meters long.
“To put length in perspective, Supersaurus is longer than four fire trucks or three large school buses,” Curtice wrote. “If we put two Supersaurus facing each other, they would cover almost an entire soccer field.”
The truth is that for the rest of the longest dinosaur candidates on the planet, such as Argentinosaurus, Brachiosaurus and Diplodocus , their assessments are based on fragmentary remains, which makes an accurate evaluation difficult.
Referencia: Brian Curtice, an Arizona Museum of Natural History paleontologist who made the exposition November 5th at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology’s.
