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Dinosaur unearthed in Argentina could be largest land animal ever

smithsonianmag.com

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Re: Dinosaur unearthed in Argentina could be largest land animal ever

#3
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.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01956...

Re: Dinosaur unearthed in Argentina could be largest land animal ever

#7

To put this in context an American football field is 160 ft x 300 ft. If one of these were in a football stadium it would be somewhat cramped.

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)

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