New dinosaur find is largest yet
Discovery in Argentina weighed 65 to 77 tons
It’s official: An Argentine dinosaur as heavy as a Boeing 737 is the biggest ever discovered.
The behemoth weighed more than 65 tons and as many as 77, a new study says. That makes the animal not just the biggest known dinosaur but also the biggest known land animal ever. Only a few whale species are heftier — and this dinosaur’s bones show it was still growing.
Scientists have christened the gigantic vegetarian Patagotitan mayorum in honor of the Argentine region of Patagonia and the Mayo family, owners of the Patagonian farm where a worker stumbled on the fossil in 2010.
The titan of Patagonia is described in detail for the first time in this week’s Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sci- ences. The study also sheds light on how and when dinosaurs went from big to truly gargantuan.
At about 120 feet long, Patagotitan has some competition as the world’s biggest dinosaur. Tantalizing scraps of bone hint at species that are more massive.
“I don’t think the record we have now will hold forever,” says study co-author Diego Pol of Ar- gentina’s Egidio Feruglio Museum of Paleontology. But “so far, out of the dinosaurs … we can recognize as valid species, we don’t have any (others) as big as Patagotitan.”
Pol and his colleagues excavated fossils of six different Patagotitan specimens from the Mayo family farm. The 150 bones include examples of 30% of the ani- mal’s skeleton, which to scientists is almost as mind-boggling as the animal’s weight. Many other dinosaurs in the so-called Titanosaur group are known from mere scraps of bone.
“This is clearly a very, very large animal, and there’s a lot of it, and that’s an extremely rare thing as these animals go,” says Matthew Lamanna of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, who was not involved in the find. “Patagotitan is going to continue to yield insights into anatomy and biology and even the size of these giant titanosaurs for years to come.”
Already Patagotitan, which lived some 100 million years ago, has shown that even the most humongous animals were sociable.
The finding suggests “they could be hanging around in groups,” perhaps to look after their young, says Roger Benson of Britain’s University of Oxford, who wasn’t involved with the study. But how animals as long as aircraft maneuvered around each other “is really hard to imagine.”