Dreadnoughtus! Largest most complete Dinosaur found yet [View all]

[Ichingcarpenter]

Today an international team of paleontologists unveiled the newest Mesozoic badass: Dreadnoughtus schrani. Weighing in at an astonishing 65 tons, standing two stories high at the shoulder, and measuring 85 feet long, this titan is the heaviest dinosaur we've ever (accurately) measured. And its discovery represents the most fossil mass ever found for a single organism—a paleontologist's dream.

"For the [largest] dinosaurs, which we call titanosaurs, finding anything around 20 percent of the fossil is usually considered a home run," says Kenneth Lacovara, the lead Drexel University paleontologist behind the find. "Normally you only find a handful of bones, and the previous record was a 27 percent complete skeleton. With Dreadnoughtus we found 70 percent."


Although Dread is a contender for the title of largest land animal ever, Lacovara explains that such a claim is actually quite complicated. The current, widely accepted champion is a dinosaur called Argentinosaurus. But Argentinosaurus is only known from a handful of fossils (around 5 percent of its total bones,) so its size and dimensions are roughly estimated. For paleontologists, the gold standard for predicting weight and height involve calculations based on several leg bones. And of the calculable dinosaurs, Dred is number 1.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/natural-disasters/dreadnoughtus-new-dino-may-be-largest-land-animal-ever-17170269