Merdeka.com – Scientists have discovered a 98-million-year-old giant dinosaur fossil in southwestern Argentina. They suspect this fossil belongs to the largest dinosaur that ever lived.
The fossil is a human-sized piece of bone. This bone belonged to a giant sauropod dinosaur that was 10-20 percent larger than the dinosaur that was once considered the world’s largest, namely Patagotitan mayorum.
Sauropods were herbivorous dinosaurs with long necks and tails. This dinosaur was the largest land creature that ever lived.
This new dinosaur fossil belongs to Mayorum Patagotitan. The bones are estimated to have weighed about 70 tonnes and were 40 meters long, or as long as four school buses.
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Hip bone
©Jose Luis Carballido/CTyS-UNLaM/AFP
The large fossil was discovered in 2012 in the Neuquen River Valley. However, new excavations were carried out in 2015.
Researcher Alejandro Otero of Argentina’s Museo de La Plata then worked to piece together the similarities of two dozen of the new fossil’s vertebrae to previously discovered pieces of dinosaur pelvis.
Otero has published a paper on the unidentified dinosaur in the Scientific Journal of Cretaceous Research.
The search for other body parts from this dinosaur fossil is still ongoing. Scientists think the discovery of a large femur can help them estimate the body mass of this long-extinct creature.
“We have more than half of the tail, a lot of hip bones,” says palenteologist Jose Luis Carbaliddo.
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