"Astoundingly huge" dinosaur skeleton unearthed

It seems every time they find a new dinosaur they just get big and bigger

Scientists have unearthed the skeleton of a previously unknown, massive dinosaur species that may be the largest land animal ever found.

The specimen named Dreadnoughtus schrani is exceptionally complete, with about 70 percent of its bones recovered. Scientists believe the creature, which lived about 77 million years ago, measured 85 feet (26 meters) long and weighed about 65 tons, heavier than a Boeing 737.

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news.yahoo.com...

news.yahoo.com...

My Ex could have rivaled it in size....

Dreadnoughtus -- sweet name!

Thanks for posting this! My kindergartener is going to crap his pants (hopefully not literally), he'll be so excited at this news.

A 30ft long Tail, holy smokes.

A boeing 737 is no measurement I could understand but that picture of its mouth, WOW.

Star and flagged.

a reply to: nighthawk1954
Wow,I bet that took some feeding!
The pic showing some vertabrae is amazing-each one is thinker than a large humans torso.

Great find, both for dino hunters and the OP. I'm reading a book now about the early history of dinosaur discoveries. Most of the early history consists of researchers and discoveries from England.

From the OP source:

Researchers have identified about 100 pieces of the gigantic skeleton, including most of the vertebrae from the animal's 30-foot-long tail, a neck vertebra with a diameter of over a yard, toes, a claw and even a single tooth.

The plant-eating dinosaur, with characteristic peg-like teeth, plank-like ribs and huge legs, belongs to a group called titanosaurs that were common in southern continents around 66 to 100 million years ago.

"Titanosaurs are a remarkable group of dinosaurs, with species ranging from the weight of a cow to the weight of a sperm whale or more," Matthew Lamanna of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, one of the researchers who unearthed the skeleton, said in a statement. "But the biggest titanosaurs have remained a mystery, because, in almost all cases, their fossils are very incomplete."

originally posted by: Taggart
A 30ft long Tail, holy smokes.

A boeing 737 is no measurement I could understand but that picture of its mouth, WOW.

Star and flagged.

They did not find the head, look at the illustration of bones found in the article.

originally posted by: proob4

originally posted by: Taggart
A 30ft long Tail, holy smokes.

A boeing 737 is no measurement I could understand but that picture of its mouth, WOW.

Star and flagged.

They did not find the head, look at the illustration of bones found in the article.

My apologies, seeing as this one isn't labelled at first glance I thought it was its mouth.

WOW! Now that is a big dinosaur. Literally a walking mountain. I understand that atmosphere composition was different back in the age of the dinosaurs, resulting in everything being much bigger, but I didn't realize that they got THAT big. This is totally cool.

There were some pretty big animals long ago. They are all gone now, either going extinct or getting smaller and forming some of the animals, birds, that are alive today. There are dinosaur bones all over the place, they look like rocks. They have been used for thousands of years to build shelters or to line gardens. People think dinosaur bones are rare, but they have been scattered everywhere by the glaciers. They are so big and brittle that a bone can be dug through with a backhoe and appear just to be a piece of soft or hard rock, depending on how it was preserved.

Most people do not know what these chunks of bone look like, thinking they are only found in museums. Finding an almost complete skeleton is rare though, usually they are broken all up by natural events. Surprising that this skeleton is white, they are usually not white. I suppose it is because of the conditions in the area that they are still white.

I know us two legs weren't around back then,but just imagine seeing one of those behemoths casually ambling through a forest,brushing aside ancient trees like toothpicks..
Imagine the earth tremor like thuds of its footfalls.

If I was alive back then,I would have tried to climb up onto one and build myself a house on its back-heck,you could probably fit a dozen houses up there,and you would be pretty safe from predators!

a reply to: nighthawk1954

Awesome find!!! Supermassive dinosaur with a weaponized tail. That's just mad.

Seriously, can you imagine how big the turd from that beast would be? Cover a good portion of the White House lawn probably....

Found this.......

originally posted by: Sublimecraft
Seriously, can you imagine how big the turd from that beast would be? Cover a good portion of the White House lawn probably....

It would also be a seismic event,scaring other dinos for miles,and maybe gassing a few nearby!
But hey,the upside is one dump is enough to fertilize a massive area when it gets rained into the soil.

Jeez........Wait until they find it's Mom.

Even if I myself don't know whether to buy into the concept, I have wondered whether the largeness of species in the past is evidence of expanding earth theory. I've heard that if you deflate earth a little everything fits together into a Pangaea state, but also, smaller earth means less gravity which means animals could grow larger because the effects of gravity were less on them. I dunno, just a thought...

Big Booty Judy! Watch your toes around that one.

I read this on FB today and was fascinated. Dino's always did that for me. SC, thank you for that video. To get a sense of scale(hopefully Hollywood has some integrity), this new dino would be half as big again as this one:

a reply to: intrepid

That's been one of my fave movie scenes since I first saw it. Watching this I realize that it is a bit sexist, as Laura Dern's mouth falls open and the guy's doesn't. My mouth has fallen open maybe four times in my life, one of them while watching Sarah Palin's first one-on-one TV interview after the 2008 Republican Convention and realizing that she was going to lose the election for the GOP and Obama would be president (a good thang).

Back on topic. So this new find would be 50 percent larger than the dino in the film clip, huh. Laura Dern would be even more impressed with that one walking by.

And after this find hopefully more dino hunting expeditions will converge on the area of Argentina where it was found and locate some more darn big vegetarians.

originally posted by: AsherahoftheSea
Even if I myself don't know whether to buy into the concept, I have wondered whether the largeness of species in the past is evidence of expanding earth theory. I've heard that if you deflate earth a little everything fits together into a Pangaea state, but also, smaller earth means less gravity which means animals could grow larger because the effects of gravity were less on them. I dunno, just a thought...

So I decided to look into this instead of sitting around wondering about it and found this article talking about a study that illuminates some reasons for (some) dinosaurs' giant size (not all dinosaurs reached dizzying sizes).

Why Dinosaurs Were So Huge

Benson and colleagues Roland Sookias and Richard Butler analyzed more than 400 species spanning the Late Permian to Middle Jurassic periods. The animals' pattern of growth during 100 million years supports a theory called "passive diffusion." This just means that various evolutionary lineages did a bunch of different things, from growing larger to growing smaller.

The findings counter a theory known as "Cope's rule," which claims that some groups, such as dinosaurs, tended to always evolve bigger bodies over time.

There is no question, however, that many dinosaurs were mega huge, at least when compared to today's land animals.

"Several aspects of dinosaurian biology may have allowed them to obtain larger maximum sizes than any other land animals," Benson said.

"For example, in many dinosaurs, parts of the skeleton contained air, and we think they had an efficient bird-like lung. These features helped them to support their weight on land more easily, and made their respiration and heat exchange more effective than in mammals."

Benson adds that since larger animals can lay more eggs and reproduce more quickly, there may have been a reproductive advantage to being big.

Brian McNab, a professor of zoology at the University of Florida, has also studied dinosaur growth trends. He thinks the biggest dinos ate often and moved little.

I also found this article which is a bit more generic and postulates a bit more.
A Snake the Size of a Plane

In the Feb. 5 issue of Nature, a group of paleontologists announced that they've found a fossil in Colombia belonging to a 43-foot snake that lived some 60 million years ago. The massive boa, which dates from the Paleocene Epoch, is the largest snake species ever discovered—it would have been the length of a school bus and weighed as much as a Volkswagen Beetle. How come prehistoric animals were so much bigger than today's beasts?

They had more time to grow. Prehistoric animals weren't all enormous. The horse's earliest known ancestor, for example, lived around the same time as the giant boa and (at roughly the size of a fox) was much smaller than today's equine. And though many prehistoric creatures did get very, very large, they didn't all appear at the same time. The hugest dinosaurs, such as the plant-eating sauropods and the giant predatory theropods, lived during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, about 65 million to 200 million years ago. Forty-five million years ago, the earth started seeing a wave of giant mammals, including the rhinolike Uintatherium and the massive Andrewsarchus. * Wooly mammoths and elephant-sized ground sloths, in turn, lived during the last ice age, between 12,000 and 5 million years ago.

In between those spikes, the earth experienced large extinction events. One of these massive die-offs 65.5 million years ago wiped out the dinosaurs, and another 34 million years ago killed off most of the large mammals. Big animals are especially vulnerable when these mass extinctions occur because they adapt and evolve more slowly, as they tend to live longer and reproduce less rapidly than other creatures.

Holy CRAP! That is a big snake! It'd probably eat you as an appetizer before moving onto the main course.

New Discovery: Dreadnoughtus, The Impossibly Huge Dinosaur - Part 1 of 2

By impossibly huge, I mean truly impossible according to the standard model of cosmology.

The Washington Post reports:

Scientists have discovered the fossilized remains of a new long-necked, long-tailed dinosaur that has taken the crown for largest terrestrial animal with a body mass that can be accurately determined.

Measurements of bones from its hind leg and foreleg revealed that the animal was 65 tons, and still growing when it died in the Patagonian hills of Argentina about 77 million years ago.

“To put this in perspective, an African elephant is about five tons, T. rex is eight tons, Diplodocus is 18 tons, and a Boeing 737 is around 50 tons,” said study author and paleontologist Kenneth Lacovara at Drexel University. “And then you have Dreadnoughtus at 65 tons.”

Drexel University professor Ken Lacovara is quoted in the video as saying, “a dinosaur in this mass range, 65 tons, is really pushing the limit as to what is physiologically possible… ” Yeah, “pushing the limit” – as in breaking the limit.

Just looking at what we know to be true about physiology today tells us that such massive beasts could not exist in Earth’s present environment. Giraffes, which are the tallest land animal, cannot get any taller because their heart wouldn’t be able to pump their blood high enough to reach their brains. If the giraffes were any taller, their veins would burst under the immense blood pressure. Giraffes have their own built in pressure suit, like a fighter pilot’s g-suit, that compresses their lower anatomy to keep their blood from pooling in their legs.

The relatively low air pressure and relatively high gravity we experience on Earth today make super-sized land animals a physical impossibility.

Scientist David Esker has done a tremendous amount of excellent research on this topic. Esker identifies four key problems with the standard model of dinosaur evolution, which in turn implies problems for the standard model of cosmology.

There are four problem areas illustrating why the largest dinosaurs and pterosaurs present a paradox to science:

-Inadequate bone strength to support the largest dinosaurs
-Inadequate muscle strength to lift and move the largest dinosaurs
-Unacceptable high blood pressure and stress on the heart of the tallest dinosaurs
-Aerodynamics principles showing that the pterosaurs should not have flown

While I fully concur with Esker’s list of problems, I emphatically disagree with his proposed solution to these problems. To address these problems, Esker theorizes that at one point Earth’s atmosphere must have been as dense as water. Esker goes into great detail on each of those four points. I highly recommend reading over his site to get a better understanding of why these problems cannot simply be written off as mainstream paleontologists have been doing for decades now.

There are only two possible theoretical explanations for these findings:

The Earth’s atmosphere was as thick as water or the Earth’s gravity was significantly less than it is today.

Water-thick air density strikes me as completely absurd, yet this is what Esker proposes because it is the only possible theory allowed for in the present standard model of cosmology. Of course, if the standard model of cosmology is wrong, then there’s no reason to assume air density is behind these ultra-large sized dinosaurs rather than a lower gravity field. The lower gravity field makes far more sense if the idea is allowed to be entertained.

It has been known for a long time that astronauts grow taller while they are in space due to the lower gravity field. The reduced pressure allows for their spines to lengthen, causing them to grow.

The water-thick air argument is a take on the “all dinosaurs must have lived in water” argument that mainstream paleontologists correctly poo-pooed when it was put forth by cellular biologist Brian J. Ford to explain these issues.

It is important to note that physicists still have no idea what causes gravity.

In physics, General Relativity assumes gravity is a function of so-called bending spacetime. Spacetime is a purely mathematical construct, it’s not a real physical entity. In order to tie General Relativity’s mathematical description of gravity to Special Relativity, a real physical system must be described. This has never been accomplished, and never will be accomplished.

Supposedly a mysterious “massless” particle called a graviton is theorized to be the gravitational force carrier at the atomic level. The Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory defines the graviton as being, “entirely theoretical constructs that delicately walk the knife-edge precipice between the domains of scientific respectability and the shady world of hand waving.”

To quote wiki on the subject:

Quantum gravity (QG) is a field of theoretical physics that seeks to describe the force of gravity according to the principles of quantum mechanics.

The current understanding of gravity is based on Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which is formulated within the framework of classical physics. On the other hand, the nongravitational forces are described within the framework of quantum mechanics, a radically different formalism for describing physical phenomena based on probability. The necessity of a quantum mechanical description of gravity follows from the fact that one cannot consistently couple a classical system to a quantum one.

Even if you believe the standard model cosmology is awesome and absolutely correct in every respect, I’m not sure how anyone could write off the possibility of a lower gravity field when we don’t fully understand gravity in the standard model now.