An American-Argentine team of scientists has discovered in Argentine Patagonia the fossil remains of a dinosaur that lived 77 million years ago in the southern tip of South America and that weighed as much as a dozen African elephants. The finding has been published in the journal Scientific Reports .
The giant dinosaur has been baptized as Dreadnoughtus schrani – which literally means “he who fears nothing” – and is the most complete skeleton discovered so far as well as being the largest land animal of which enough remains have been found to calculate its body mass, according to the agency Sinc.
According to paleontologists, it belongs to the family of titanosaurs, giant herbivorous dinosaurs, which were very abundant in the area during the Upper Cretaceous era. It was about 26 meters long (with a 11-meter neck and a 30-foot tail) and weighed about 60,000 kilograms .
To maintain this enormous size, this dinosaur had to eat huge amounts of plants every day : “imagine having as an obsession only eating. Each day he tried to consume enough calories to nourish his house-sized body. I imagine their day-to-day life consisted largely of standing in one place, ”says study co-author Kenneth Lacovara.
Thanks to the fact that the skeleton is very complete (70% of its bones have been found between 2005 and 2009), scientists will be able to better understand the anatomy and biomechanics of large sauropods such as that of this giant whose femur and humerus found, from 1.80 meters, allow a fairly accurate idea of the colossal proportions of this animal.
