Buenos Aires, Argentina:
Scientists have unearthed enormous, 98-million-year-old fossils in southwest Argentina they say could have belonged to the biggest dinosaur ever found.
Human-sized pieces of fossilized bone belonging to the giant sauropod seem to be 10-20 % bigger than these attributed to Patagotitan mayorum, the greatest dinosaur ever identified, according to a statement Wednesday from the National University of La Matanza’s CTYS scientific agency.
Sauropods had been huge extended-necked, extended-tailed, plant-consuming dinosaurs — the biggest terrestrial creatures to ever have lived.
Among them, Patagotitan mayorum, also from Argentina, weighed in at about 70 tonnes and was 40 meters (131 feet) extended, or about the length of 4 college buses.
Alejandro Otero of Argentina’s Museo de La Plata is working on piecing with each other a likeness of the new dinosaur from two-dozen vertebrae and bits of pelvic bone uncovered so far.
He has published a paper on the unidentified dinosaur for the scientific journal Cretaceous Research, according to the university statement.
The quest for more body components, buried deep in rock, continues. For scientists, the holy grail will be the substantial femur or humerus bones, which are beneficial in estimating a extended-extinct creature’s body mass.
The enormous fossils had been found in 2012 in the Neuquen River Valley, but excavation work only started in 2015, according to palaeontologist Jose Luis Carballido of the Museo Egidio Feruglio.
“We have more than half the tail, a lot of hip bones,” mentioned Carballido, who also worked on the classification of Patagotitan a handful of years ago. “It’s obviously still inside the rock, so we have a few more years of digging ahead of us.”
The enormous skeleton was discovered in a layer of rock dated to some 98 million years ago for the duration of the Upper Cretaceous period, added geologist Alberto Garrido, director of the Museum of Natural Sciences of Zapala.
“We suspect that the specimen may be complete or almost complete,” he mentioned. “Everything depends on what happens with the excavations. But regardless of whether it is bigger (than Patagotitan) or not, the discovery of an intact dinosaur of such dimensions is a novelty.”
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