The bones of a dinosaur that may have been the largest creature ever to have walked on earth have been discovered in Argentina.
The dinosaur is a new species of Titanosaur and scientists say these dinosaurs could have grown to be 130-feet long, 65-feet tall and weigh as much as180,000-pounds.
Titanosaurs were long-necked sauropods that lived in the Late Cretaceous period.
The dinosaur bones were found by an agricultural worker last week and were excavated a few days later.
A team from the Museum of Paleontology Egidio Feruglio has been studying the bones and were extremely impressed with the condition of the bones and their size.
Although the team claims the dinosaur may have been the biggest animal ever to walk the planet, dinosaur expert Dr. Paul Barrett from the London Natural History Museum says this may not be true.
“Without knowing more about this current find it’s difficult to be sure,” Dr. Barrett said. “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,” he added. “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.”
The excavation team was able to recover 150 bones and will continue to study them and compare them to the bones of other dinosaurs.
The giant herbivores lived over 95 million years ago and scientists believe that there are numerous other dinosaur bones located in the same area where the Titanosaur bones were recently found.
What do you think of the giant dinosaur bones and do you think the Titanosaur was the biggest dinosaur to ever live?
Images via YouTube and Wikimedia Commons