To understand the scope of this news, perhaps the most important so far this year in the world of paleontology, the first thing to remember is that dinosaurs appeared in the Secondary or Mesozoic Era, which began 252 million years ago. and it extended 186 million years, and that this era was divided into three periods: Triassic, Jurassic and, finally, Cretaceous. When we talk about dinosaurs, we tend to imagine giants like the tyrannosaurus and the triceratops or supergiants like the sauropods – popularly known as “long necks” – but none of them existed yet in the Triassic . In fact, it was thought that there had been no dinosaurs. giants in that first Mesozoic period, but their origins had been in the Jurassic.
Now it has just been discovered that we were wrong, that these colossal animals inhabited the Earth 30 million years earlier than we supposed, and all this thanks to the finding made by a team of Argentine researchers at the Balde de Leyes site, located in the southeast of the province of San Juan. There they have found the fossils of a specimen that exceeds three times the size of the largest Triassic dinosaurs that were known until now, since it had a body mass of about ten tons. They have baptized it with the name of Ingentia prima (“The first giant”), and it inhabited the Earth more than 200 million years ago.
The study has been published in the scientific journal Nature Ecology & Evolution , and its main author has been Dr. Cecilia Apaldetti, who is a researcher at the Institute and Museum of Natural Sciences (IMCN) of the Faculty of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences of the National University of San Juan and CONICET.
“Before this discovery, it was considered that gigantism had arisen during the Jurassic period , approximately 180 million years ago, but Ingentia prima lived at the end of the Triassic, between 210 and 205 million years ago,” said Apaldetti, according to a press release made public by the National University of San Juan.
The origin of gigantism
The 10 tons that the Ingentia prima weighed seem very few compared to the almost 70 of the titanosaurs (which could measure up to 16 meters in height and whose length could reach 37 meters), typical of the Cretaceous, but it laid the foundations of the gigantism among dinosaurs. This is how Apaldetti explains it: “It is a true giant, especially for that moment of evolution, in which most of the animals that coexisted did not exceed two meters in height and the heaviest reached, at most, three tons ”. “That is why we see in Ingentia prima the origin of gigantism, the first steps so that, more than 100 million years later, sauropods of up to 70 tons, such as Argentinosaurus or Patagotitan , from southern Argentina came to exist,” he adds.
The Ingentia prima was a herbivore that, as explained by the Argentine researcher in statements to the newspaper Clarín , “knew how to have the intelligence to grow fast, like no other dinosaur, and also as a defense strategy so as not to be so vulnerable to the carnivores, the ancestors of the crocodiles, which were the patrons of the time ”.
If you want to know more about dinosaurs, don’t miss the VERY special that you can already find on your newsstand, entitled The Fascinating World of Dinosaurs , an updated guide to the fauna that dominated the Secondary Era on our planet, with hyper-realistic illustrations by José Antonio Peñas, one of the best paleo-illustrators in the world. If you want to get this copy, request it at [email protected] . You can also buy it through Zinio or Kiosko y Más.
Illustration: Jorge A. González
Photo: Agencia CTyS-UNLaM
