PHILADELPHIA — Eighty-five feet long, 30 feet tall, 130,000 pounds and still growing when it died, a newly described dinosaur is among the largest land animals that ever lived — so big its discoverers are calling it the Dreadnoughtus.
Its skeleton, unearthed in the Patagonia region of Argentina, is the first of this species and the most complete ever found in the group of gargantuan dinosaurs known as titanosaurs, scientists reported on Thursday. An international team led by Kenneth J. Lacovara, a paleontologist at Drexel University in Philadelphia, describes the fossil in the journal Scientific Reports.
“What we can say with certainty is this is the biggest land animal that we can actually put a number on,” Dr. Lacovara said.
Even what remains of the bones is huge. “We’ve got 16 tons of bone in my lab right now,” Dr. Lacovara said.
The better-known Brachiosaurus weighed only 75,000 pounds; an empty Boeing 737-900 weighs about 93,700 pounds. A male African elephant, the largest land animal today, weighs a minuscule 15,000 pounds by comparison. (Blue whales dwarf all land animals, past and present, growing to 300,000 pounds.)
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/05/science/dinosaur-dreadnoughtus-discovery.html?_r=0