Read more: Click here to read the original, longer version of this story.
THEY just keep getting bigger. The latest dinosaur to be discovered was 26 metres long and around seven times as heavy as Tyrannosaurus rex. Named Dreadnoughtus schrani, it is the largest known land animal whose size can be reliably calculated.
The 77-million-year-old fossil was found in Argentina in 2005. While other huge sauropods are known from handfuls of bones, almost half of its skeleton has been recovered.
Advertisement
This meant Kenneth Lacovara of Drexel University in Philadelphia and his team could estimate the beast鈥檚 weight precisely. At 59.3 tonnes, it dwarfed the 42.8-tonne Elaltitan lilloi, the next-largest dino (Scientific Reports, ). By comparison, Brachiosaurus and Diplodocus are minnows, at just 34 and 15 tonnes.
The bones also show where muscles attached, so we can figure out how they moved, says Lacovara.
鈥�Dreadnoughtus may be able to help us understand the upper size limits to life on land,鈥� says Paul Barrett at the Natural History Museum in London.
In life Dreadnoughtus may have been even larger than the fossil, as it was still growing when it died.
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淟argest dino yet makes T. rex look tiny鈥�