Biggest dinosaur ever' discovered

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Edge Guerrero
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Biggest dinosaur ever' discovered

Postby Edge Guerrero » Sat May 17, 2014 7:01 pm

By James Morgan
Science reporter, BBC News

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Fossilised bones of a dinosaur believed to be the largest creature ever to walk the Earth have been unearthed in Argentina, palaeontologists say.

Based on its huge thigh bones, it was 40m (130ft) long and 20m (65ft) tall.

Weighing in at 77 tonnes, it was as heavy as 14 African elephants, and seven tonnes heavier than the previous record holder, Argentinosaurus.

Scientists believe it is a new species of titanosaur - an enormous herbivore dating from the Late Cretaceous period.

A local farm worker first stumbled on the remains in the desert near La Flecha, about 250km (135 miles) west of Trelew, Patagonia.

The fossils were then excavated by a team of palaeontologists from the Museum of Palaeontology Egidio Feruglio, led by Dr Jose Luis Carballido and Dr Diego Pol.

They unearthed the partial skeletons of seven individuals - about 150 bones in total - all in "remarkable condition".

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A film crew from the BBC Natural History Unit was there to capture the moment the scientists realised exactly how big their discovery was.

By measuring the length and circumference of the largest femur (thigh bone), they calculated the animal weighed 77 tonnes.

"Given the size of these bones, which surpass any of the previously known giant animals, the new dinosaur is the largest animal known that walked on Earth," the researchers told BBC News.

"Its length, from its head to the tip of its tail, was 40m.

"Standing with its neck up, it was about 20m high - equal to a seven-storey building."

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The new dinosaur is a type of sauropod similar to Argentinosaurus, illustrated here

This giant herbivore lived in the forests of Patagonia between 95 and 100 million years ago, based on the age of the rocks in which its bones were found.

But despite its magnitude, it does not yet have a name.

"It will be named describing its magnificence and in honour to both the region and the farm owners who alerted us about the discovery," the researchers said.


There have been many previous contenders for the title "world's biggest dinosaur".

The most recent pretender to the throne was Argentinosaurus, a similar type of sauropod, also discovered in Patagonia.

Originally thought to weigh in at 100 tonnes, it was later revised down to about 70 tonnes - just under the 77 tonnes that this new sauropod is thought to have weighed.

The picture is muddied by the various complicated methods for estimating size and weight, based on skeletons that are usually incomplete.

Argentinosaurus was estimated from only a few bones. But the researchers here had dozens to work with, making them more confident that they really have found "the big one".

Dr Paul Barrett, a dinosaur expert from London's Natural History Museum, agreed the new species is "a genuinely big critter. But there are a number of similarly sized big sauropod thigh bones out there," he cautioned.

"Without knowing more about this current find it's difficult to be sure. One problem with assessing the weight of both Argentinosaurus and this new discovery is that they're both based on very fragmentary specimens - no complete skeleton is known, which means the animal's proportions and overall shape are conjectural.

"Moreover, several different methods exist for calculating dinosaur weight (some based on overall volume, some on various limb bone measurements) and these don't always agree with each other, with large measures of uncertainty.

"So it's interesting to hear another really huge sauropod has been discovered, but ideally we'd need much more material of these supersized animals to determine just how big they really got."

Source:http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-27441156

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Postby Masato » Sun May 18, 2014 1:38 pm

Hey Edge - is it at all possible that bones might expand over so many thousands of years in the dirt?

I have zero real knowledge of paleontology, but have often wondered if something simple like this might fuck up the whole dinosaur theory lol

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Postby Edge Guerrero » Sun May 18, 2014 3:29 pm

Masato wrote:Hey Edge - is it at all possible that bones might expand over so many thousands of years in the dirt?

I have zero real knowledge of paleontology, but have often wondered if something simple like this might fuck up the whole dinosaur theory lol


- That's a good question, as a dinosaurs nerd i prefer to believe that no, but that's maybe a good posibility.

Luigi can share some light on this?



The biggest dinosaurs were herbivores, just like today the biggest animals don't eat meat.(Thank god) :mrgreen:

Some of the theories i've read are: Growth spur, repitilians live more, the dinosaurs found were old:

What about the huge ones? Were they simply old?

Even the big dinosaurs were small before their teenage growth spurt.
There were comparatively few real kinds of dinosaur compared to the number of named ‘species’.

Until fairly recently, scientists thought that the dinosaurs could grow so big because they were reptiles. Reptiles can keep growing till they die, while mammals (including man) stop growing at adulthood. According to the Encyclopædia Britannica CD (2005):

‘The significant difference between growth in reptiles and that in mammals is that a reptile has the potential of growing throughout its life, whereas a mammal reaches a terminal size and grows no more, even though it may subsequently live many years in ideal conditions’ [italics added].
The pro-evolution Walking with Dinosaurs website provided an example of this reasoning:

‘A huge animal called Seismosaurus was found in New Mexico and many palaeontologists believe it is really an old Diplodocus. It weighed 30 tonnes and was 45 metres (150 ft) long.’2
And the Walking with Dinosaurs TV series itself claimed that the huge size (150 tonnes) they claimed for the pliosaur Liopleurodon meant it must have been over 100 years old.


Teenage growth spurts


Dinosaur Growth Spurts
But this couldn’t explain everything. There’s no way a gecko or skink, for example, will grow as big as a 50-tonne Brachiosaurus. Gregory Erickson, a paleontologist at Florida State University in Tallahassee, and other researchers, studied dinosaur bones for their equivalent of growth rings.3 They showed that dinosaurs had a type of adolescent growth spurt—the pattern is called sigmoidal, or s–shaped. In fact, the growth pattern is more similar to that of birds and mammals than that of reptiles.4,5

For example, in the huge Apatosaurus, the spurt started at the age of about five years, when the dinosaur was only one tonne. During the spurt, it grew at over five tonnes per year, then the growth levelled off at the age of 12–13, when it was about 25 tonnes (see graph, above right). This was the most dramatic example, but other dinosaurs such as the 1700 kg (3700 lb) Maiasaura and the much smaller 20 kg (44 lb) Syntarsus and Psittacosaurus had the same sigmoid pattern.

Erickson later led a distinguished team in a study just of the tyrannosaurid kind, including the mighty T. rex. This showed the same pattern. At the age of 10, it was still less than half a tonne. But after it started its growth spurt, from age 14–18 it grew at a rate of about 2 kg (4–5 pounds) per day, or a maximum of 767 kg per year. By its early 20s, it was about as big as it would ever be, they said—about 5½ tonnes.6 However, the biggest specimen, the famous ‘Sue’, was also the oldest, but they still estimated that it was only 28 when it died (full of injuries7). Erickson said, ‘T. rex lived fast and died young. They were like the James Dean of dinosaurs.’8

This study also analyzed other tyrannosaurids called Daspletosaurus, Gorgosaurus and Albertosaurus. These all had the same growth patterns, but not nearly as extreme. So it seems that they were the same created kind, and T. rex was simply a giant form, just as we have in some humans. And as with many giant humans, the giantism comes at a cost.

Superficially, the T. rex body plan might give the impression it was a fast runner. But this structure simply will not allow fast running for this type of animal over one tonne, which the T. rex reached at age 13.6 So the Jurassic Park scene of a T. rex outrunning a jeep is pure fiction—to do that, it would have needed muscle weighing over twice the entire animal!9,10

Another thing not all dinosaurs were giants, the giant's only happened to get more famous.
Most of them were small animals.

Source:http://creation.com/how-did-dinosaurs-grow-so-big

The gravidity was diferent millions years ago, this would allow to bigger animals, plants, giant insects:

Source:http://galileospendulum.org/2013/02/25/was-weaker-gravity-responsible-for-large-dinosaur-size/

The cool thing is Jose Canseco sharing his opinion about the subject on that link^^

Now that i talked in circles like a politic,
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Postby Edge Guerrero » Sun May 18, 2014 3:35 pm

- Ps: The only reason that not, is because i want my dinosaurs to be giants.

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‘A huge animal called Seismosaurus was found in New Mexico and many palaeontologists believe it is really an old Diplodocus. It weighed 30 tonnes and was 45 metres (150 ft) long.’2
And the Walking with Dinosaurs TV series itself claimed that the huge size (150 tonnes) they claimed for the pliosaur Liopleurodon meant it must have been over 100 years old.

- 150 ton dino?
Wtf is wrong with those guys. :ugeek: :ugeek:
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Postby Masato » Mon May 19, 2014 10:36 am

IWhy are the bones brittle when they discover them?

Have they lost mass? If so where did it go?

Eventually things just rot back to earth (ashes to ashes, dust to dust). The idea that the bones over MILLIONS of years would just slowly absorb water, that the dense-ness of the molecules would relax, that bits of earth would enter into the bone mass etc and the bones could expand seems a perfectly sensible proposition to me (being totally un-schooled in these matters lol)

try putting something porous in a wet garden over night; I bet by morning it has soaked up a lot of water and dirt and is bigger than when you put it in!

I need to find some proof debunking this idea lol

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Postby Luigi » Tue May 20, 2014 9:28 am

Edge: Not sure about millions of years, but I have worked with bones 4000 years old and never seen any obvious indication of size change.

Masato: Not sure why bones become more brittle over long periods of time underground, but I can confirm its true.
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Postby Edge Guerrero » Tue May 20, 2014 11:18 am

Luigi wrote:Edge: Not sure about millions of years, but I have worked with bones 4000 years old and never seen any obvious indication of size change.

Masato: Not sure why bones become more brittle over long periods of time underground, but I can confirm its true.


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