My thoughts go the the paelontologist first finding this - they start with a little paint brush, carefully uncovering a tail, then more tail, then a month later they are still on the freaking tail, worn down the bristles on two brushes and thinking "yeah yeah career making discovery but jesus a velociraptor would be done by now."
Edit:
This is amazingly cool however - and honestly I cannot wait for Covid to end, decent public funding of science to appear and a facsimile of this skeleton to get stuck in every natural history museum going - my kids will be sick of their dad dragging them off to see a 120 foot long pile of bones - but up close and personal is pretty much the only way to appreciate this sort of thing.
Right that's it - tomorrow it's tape measeures and chalk outlines in the road outside!
This article confuses me. Why does it make the scientists out to be on opposite sides of the aisle? A giraffe that wins a neck to neck fight is also one that may have better chances of finding food high up a tree when resources are scarce - both can lead to better survival and hence passing of genes. It's not one or the other, it can can be both.
I used to live in Tanzania and over there, the trees are mostly shorter than the giraffes, but I'm sure they reach up to eat sometimes. I guess my point was that giraffes didn't evolve long necks to eat.
The weight estimate on that website has to be way off.
A male elephant can weigh up to 7 tons and they say that Titanosaurus would have weighed around 13 tons. Even with much lighter bones & co., at that size there's no way it would have weighed that little. A mammoth could weigh up to 12 tons, as another point of comparison.
A dinosaur like the one they depict would have weighed at least 50 tons, IMO.
Of course they come in various sizes, so it means anything from 1.5 m³ to just over 6 m³. A very rough measure, in other words, which makes sense in context.
("Container" is both "container" and "dumpster" in Swedish, and it's pronounced pretty much as "container" in English since it's a loan word, but the meanings have diverged, I guess.)
That view was mostly abandoned in the 70s-90s. They were just built very lightly, using a lot of the same weight-saving techniques (hollow, airy bones) used by modern birds.
(This lightness makes it unlikely they could function well in water; their torsos would float before getting very well immersed, which would indeed take weight off, but would also mean they'd have to hop along awkwardly on their front feet. This is supported by front-feet-only sauropod prints on once-submerged areas.)
Side note: I'm very interested to know if those weight-saving measures came from a common ancestor between sauropods and birds, or if that's just convergent evolution in two branches of the dinosaur family that were solving similar engineering problems.
Unlikely, I would think. An elephant could walk under it, but “stepping over” IMO would require it to be able to lift both its front and back feet by the height of an elephant (and make steps the width of an elephant, but that, I think is feasible).
How high a hurdle can an elephant clear? I know they can put their front feet on a pedestal that’s, ballpark, ½m, but I don’t see them step over one.
The paper Report of a giant titanosaur sauropod from the Upper Cretaceous of Neuquén Province, Argentina [1]:
> One of the most fascinating research topics in the field of sauropod dinosaurs is the evolution of gigantism. In the particular case of Titanosauria, the record of multi-ton species (those exceeding 40 tons) comes mainly from Patagonia. The record of super-sized titanosaur sauropods has traditionally been extremely fragmentary, although recent discoveries of more complete taxa have revealed significant anatomical information previously unavailable due to preservation biases. In this contribution we present a giant titanosaur sauropod from the Candeleros Formation (Cenomanian, circa 98 Ma) of Neuquén Province, composed of an articulated sequence of 20 most anterior plus 4 posterior caudal vertebrae and several appendicular bones.
Wow. Something tells me if this is the new record for land animals we'll eventually find something that lived in the ocean that's bigger than a blue whale.
I can only imagine we don’t do much digging for fossils in the sea floor, given how inaccessible it is and how lightly explored the oceans are in general. The exception being sea floor sufficiently ancient that it is now land.
That's probably not a great visualization, since the actual football green is a tiny fraction of the stadium, and not even all of the actual pitch. The dinosaur is 40% of the length of the playable field, ignoring endzones and other buffer.
(don't get me wrong, it's still Very Large, but we're not talking Godzilla v Kong here)
Comparison to the field is like a dog in a kennel. I'd call that cramped. A stadium would be like a human in a studio apartment. I'd call that somewhat cramped
> long-necked, plant-eating dinosaur called a titanosaur, potentially the largest ever unearthed.
I know the sauropods were mostly vegetarian but I can't help but figure that an animal of that size must have inadvertently swallowed a fair number of smaller animals.
A lot of herbivores are 'opportunistic carnivores'.
Deer and cows sometimes eat small birds or rodents if they can catch them. Seems they're just not really equipped to hunt. But they aren't actually vegetarian as we like to think they are.
Plus isn't accurate that oxygen in air was much higher in the era this new found dinosaur was found?
(edit) seems that this new find would be in the middle of the cretaceous period and according to some quick googling, it is thought the 02 levels were ~30% versus ~20% today.
Yes, up to 35% during the Carboniferous period, which allowed a whole host of creatures to get much bigger than they are today. I'm not sure when it dropped to the modern 21%, though.
Some of the world’s tallest folks are from East Africa, and most of Africa is fairly high above sea level.
Peruvians of Incan descent tend to be short, and I have heard that it is because of the elevated areas in which they live, so it’s likely to be a product of multiple coefficients.
I didn't understand why the existing Patagontitan fossil and this new one weren't considered larger than the largest known Antarctic blue whale at 98 feet.
But it looks like by "largest animal" in this article they mean by weight.
The LONGEST animal is a 150 feet siphonophore, which seems to be some kind of jellyfish looking animal (I'm not sure about where it taxonomically fits on the tree of life though).
There is a truly excellent children’s book about the discovery of the Patagotitan, also in Argentina. It was my son’s favorite story for months. Highly Recommended!
It’s only just occurred to me that dinosaur bones like this are in soil not rock? Even if it’s not technically soil, the bones are at least buried in something fairly soft.
That’s crazy. I’ve only ever thought of fossils as being encased inside hard rock.
The bias of the fossil record makes a discovery like this so unlikely that it’s objectively joyous when it happens.
The largest known dinosaur prior to this find was also found in Argentina, and aptly named the Argentinosaurus. He was 30m to 40m in length and weighed up to 100 Tonnes.
Edit: This is amazingly cool however - and honestly I cannot wait for Covid to end, decent public funding of science to appear and a facsimile of this skeleton to get stuck in every natural history museum going - my kids will be sick of their dad dragging them off to see a 120 foot long pile of bones - but up close and personal is pretty much the only way to appreciate this sort of thing.
Right that's it - tomorrow it's tape measeures and chalk outlines in the road outside!