New Giant Dino from South America
11:10 am
National Geographic has a report on Puertasaurus reuili, a newly-named sauropod of gigantic proportions.
According to the article, Puertasaurus is known from only four vertebrae. But as this photo shows, even one vertebra is enough to see that this was an enormous animal. Comparisons with smaller, more-completely-known relatives suggest that Puertasaurus would have been between 115 to 131 feet (35 to 40 meters) long and weighed between 88 and 110 tons (80 and 100 metric tons). It is estimated that its chest alone would be as large as a full-grown elephant.
The vertebrae of Puertasaurus reuili (named after Pablo Puerta and Santiago Reuil, who discovered and prepared the fossils) were found in 70,000,000 year-old rocks in Argentina’s Santa Cruz province. Interestingly, the only sauropod that rivals Puertasaurus in size is the massive Argentinosaurus huinculensis, who was stomping around Cretaceous Argentina 20,000,000 years before Puertasaurus. Something about South America in the Late Cretaceous seems to have favored the evolution of giant titanosaur sauropods, and similarly scaled-up predators.
Palentologist Fernando Novas announced the discovery of Puertasaurus during an event earlier this month at the Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales. A press kit containing photos of the locality and restorations by paleoartist Gabriel Lio is available to download here.
Update 7/31: You can download a 2.3Mb PDF of the paper describing Puertasaurus from the Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales.
Do you know how this super-sauropod compares to the gargantuan diplodocid Amphicoelias fragillimus, reported by Cope in 1878 from the Morrison Formation of western North America?
Great question! Give me a little time and I’ll work up a comparison of the super-sauropods.
[...] In the comments to last Sunday’s post on the giant South American sauropod Puertasaurus, wolfwalker asked how this new contender for biggest dinosaur ever compares to Amphicoelias fragillimus, a giant North American sauropod named by Edward Drinker Cope in 1878. [...]