5 of the world’s most enigmatic dinosaur finds Huge arms belonged to bizarre dinosaur
A set of 2.4-metre-long arms with powerful claws... a pair of large fossilised testicles... Over the years, scientists have made some unusually mysterious finds that they are now finally beginning to understand. PLACE OF DISCOVERY:
60-metre-long dinosaur was an error PLACE OF DISCOVERY:
USA, 1877
A number of long-necked dinosaurs are vying for the title of the biggest terrestrial animal of all time, including Argentinosaurus and Patagotitan. They both grew about 40 metres long and weighed up to 70 tonnes. But a mysterious bone discovered in 1877 made them small by comparison. The bone, a vertebra, was 2.7 metres tall, according to the original description, and belonged to a long-necked dinosaur named Amphicoelias fragillimus. Calculations based on the description suggest that A. fragillimus was 58 metres long and weighed 122 tonnes. But the bone has since been lost, and in 2014 US researchers cast doubt on its reported size. According to them, there is probably a misprint in the description, shrinking the bone and A. fragillimus to the same size as its competitors.
Fossilised testicles cause confusion
PLACE OF DISCOVERY:
England, 1676
A fossil discovered in the 1600s was initially identified as part of the femur of a war elephant or some biblical giant. Almost 100 years later the fossil was depicted in a book, but this time the caption read “Scrotum humanum”, meaning something like ‘human testicles’. This idea was developed by French philosopher Jean-Baptiste-René Robinet, who took the fossil as proof of his ideas around the transmutation of species, an early form of evolution theory which included minerals and rock – as proven by the rock testicles, in which Robinet identified what he thought to be musculature and a urethra. The original discoverers had been closer: modern scientists believe the fossil is a fragment of a femur from the predatory dinosaur Megalosaurus.
Cylinder may have been from the world’s biggest animal PLACE OF DISCOVERY:
England, 1844
A series of cylindrical bone fragments found in England have puzzled scientists since their discovery in the 1800s. A variety of possibilities have been suggested, including that they were femur fragments from a stegosaurus, a herbivorous dinosaur with plates and spikes on its back. But in 2016, a cylinder turned up still attached to the rest of the original bone, revealing that the cylinders were not from dinosaurs at all. Instead they were part of the jaw of ichthyosaurs, dolphin-like marine reptiles. Calculations show that the largest of the cylinders was from an animal that may have measured up to 36 metres in length – longer than the longest blue whales, previously thought to be the biggest animals in Earth’s history.
PLACE OF DISCOVERY:
Mongolia, 1965
A set of 2.4-metre-long arms from a huge predatory dinosaur emerged from the sand of the Gobi Desert in 1965. The extraordinary fossil was named Deinocheirus – but scientists never found the rest of the body. The discovery gave rise to wild speculation. Some calculated that if the animal had the same proportions as a T. rex, it would have been 30 metres long! But in 2014, the mystery of the arms was solved when researchers found the entire body of the animal. Although the dinosaur was ‘only’ 11 metres long – about the same as T. rex – it was more bizarre than anyone had imagined. It had a large hump on its back, and its elongated head ended in a duck-like, toothless beak, evidence that the orginally carnivorous dinosaur had switched to a mainly vegetarian diet.
Enigmatic predator was bombed to pieces
Egypt, 1912
In 1912, German palaeontologist Ernst Stromer received a shipment of enigmatic bones from Egypt. They belonged to a large predatory dinosaur, but a highly unusual one. On the vertebrae were spines some 1.7 metres high, forming a kind of sail. Unfortunately, most of the rest of the body was missing, so the discovery – named Spinosaurus – attracted little attention, a situation which did not improve when all the bones were bombed to smithereens by the British in 1944. Only now, thanks to a newly discovered skeleton, have scientists got a good picture of the predatory dinosaur’s body. It grew to 15 metres in length, longer than T. rex, but with unusually short hind legs and a tail shaped like a paddle, making some scientists think it preferred swimming to walking.