Experts believe it is a new species of тιтanosaurus, a giant herbivore that dates back to the late Cretaceous. A local farmer in the desert near La Flecha, about 250 km (135 mi) west of Trelew, Patagonia, found the remains of what was once the largest land animal. It took five years and a team of American and Argentine researchers to unearth the remains of the giant animal. Researchers have made an accurate estimate of the size of the Schrani battleship by discovering the so far complete skeleton of a giant dinosaur, with more than 70% of its bones.
“Professor Kenneth Lacovara, of Drexel University, Philadelphia, who found the skeleton and led the excavation and analysis, said: “Dreadnoughtus schrani is amazingly large.
“It weighed as much as a dozen African elephants or more than seven tyrannosaurs. Surprisingly, the skeletal evidence suggests that when this 65-ton specimen died, it was still immature. This is by far the best example we have of any giant creature that has ever walked the planet.
” According to the researchers, scientists believe that Dreadnoughtus schrani lived 77 million years ago. year in a temperate forest in the southernmost tip of South America and is so large that it is unlikely to be threatened by a T-rex.Professor Lacovara commented:
“With a body the size of a house, the weight of a herd of elephants and a pointed tail, Dreadnoughtus would fear nothing.
“That reminds me of a type of battleship from the beginning of the last century called a battleship, very large, covered with a thick shell and almost impervious to water.
When the ground on which it stood turned to quicksand due to the floods, this huge creature died and was buried deep underground. The rapid and deep burial of a Dreadnoughtus specimen explains its extraordinary integrity.
Their misfortune is our luck,” said Professor Lacovara. Dr Paul Barrett, a dinosaur expert at the Natural History Museum in London, agrees that the new species is “a really big creature. But there are some similarly sized large sauropod femurs out there,” he warned.
“Dreadnoughtus gives us our first look at the anatomy of these giant sauropods, which was previously known from fairly sketchy literature.” He added: “This new information should help shed light on the relationship between these giants and the number of times gigantism actually evolved.” Without knowing more about this current finding, it’s hard to be sure.
One problem with the weight assessment of Argentinosaurus and this new discovery is that both are based on very fragmented specimens: the complete skeleton is unknown, meaning the animal’s overall proportions and shape is just a matter of time. guess.
“Also, there are a number of different methods for calculating the weight of dinosaurs (some are based on total mass, others are based on different measurements of the limb bones) and these methods are not always also agree with each other, with a large error.
“So it’s exciting to know that another truly giant sauropod has been discovered, but ideally we need more material from these giant animals to determine if they really were that big.” to what extent.
