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Paleontologists say the discovered the fossilized bones of the biggest dinosaur that ever lived, the BBC reported.
The bones were first found by a local farmer in a desert near La Flecha, 135 miles west of the city of Trelew in the Patagonia region of Argentina. A team of paleontologists from the Museum of Paleontology Egidio Feruglio went on to unearth the skeleton of a nearly 100 million-year-old prehistoric beast.
“Given the size of these bones, which surpass any of the previously known giant animals, the new dinosaur is the largest animal known that walked on Earth,” the researchers said. “Its length, from its head to the tip of its tail, was 40m.
“Standing with its neck up, it was about 20m high – equal to a seven-story building.”
They believe it will dethrone the unofficial “largest dinosaur ever,” the Argentinosaurus that weighed 70 tons. That dinosaur had significantly less bones for scientists to estimate its size from.
“Without knowing more about this current find it’s difficult to be sure,” Dr. Paul Barrett, a dinosaur expert from London’s Natural History Museum, told BBC News. “One problem with assessing the weight of both Argentinosaurus and this new discovery is that they’re both based on very fragmentary specimens – no complete skeleton is known, which means the animal’s proportions and overall shape are conjectural.”
For this reason, any dinosaur named to be “the largest ever” will have to carry the title unofficially.
“Moreover, several different methods exist for calculating dinosaur weight (some based on overall volume, some on various limb bone measurements) and these don’t always agree with each other, with large measures of uncertainty,” Barrett said. “So it’s interesting to hear another really huge sauropod has been discovered, but ideally we’d need much more material of these supersized animals to determine just how big they really got.”
Agencies/Canadajournal
