Is the Patagotitan mayorum the biggest dinosaur of all?
Weighing nearly 70 tons, heavier than 10 adult African elephants, this dinosaur was the largest animal to ever walk on Earth, according to some scientists.
This plant-eating beast first made headlines in 2014, after a rancher from Patagonia in Argentina discovered a fossil bone. Last year, the American Museum of Natural History in New York added a cast of the 122-foot-long dinosaur to its exhibit. Its neck and head are so long that they extend outside the gallery.
Despite its fame, the dinosaur did not have an official scientific name — until now.
A report published Wednesday in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. calls it Patagotitan mayorum. “Patagotitan” can be interpreted as “giant from Patagonia,” and “mayorum” is a tribute to the rancher family that hosted a team of paleontologists, geologists, students and volunteers as they excavated dozens of fossils from the area.
More than 150 Patagotitan fossils have been unearthed there over the past few years. Finding a significant number of fossils belonging to the same species is not rare, dinosaur specialist José Luis Carballido told The Washington Post in an email. But for such a big animal, it is.
“It’s a real paleontological treasure,” Carballido said.
Patagotitan, which lived about 100 million years ago during the late Cretaceous Period, is considered a titanosaur, a diverse lineage of plant-eating, longnecked dinosaurs with long tails that walked on four legs.
Titanosaurs varied greatly in size, with the smallest species weighing as much as an adult elephant and the largest ones weighing more than 60 tons. The discovery of Patagotitan gave scientists a clearer picture of how titanosaurs evolved in terms of their body mass. Scientists have found fossils of other giant dinosaurs in the titanosaur lineage such as Argentinosaurus and Puertasaurus in the Argentine desert. But unlike Patagotitan, scientists had to rely on a limited number of bones to get a sense of their weight and size, Carballido said.
Some, however, are cautious about proclaiming Patagotitan the biggest of them all.
“I think it would be more accurate to say that Argentinosaurus, Puertasaurus and Patagotitan are so similar in size that it is impossible for now to say which one was the largest,” said Mathew Wedel, a paleontologist at Western University of Health Sciences in California.