7 ms·

Titanosaurs were the biggest land animals Earth's ever seen

96 points by makerdiety 3y ago

emp_ 3y ago
I remember one day many years ago just snapping wondering what had been the the biggest animal to ever exist on earth, and after a few searches it seems like the consensus was *NOT* a dinosaur but the Blue Whale which still exists today, still think about it from time to time. The article only discusses land animals but I wonder if the blue whale still reigns after more modern discoveries.
- boomboomsubban 3y ago
  We can't say with certainty that the blue whale is the largest animal ever, but to our knowledge at most there were several other species approximately the same size. And even those are based on estimates with rather huge ranges. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest_and_heaviest_animals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest_and_heaviest_animals
- conductr 3y ago
  I read a book to my kid regularly that says that fact about blue whales too and I always kind of think it seems odd that it would be the biggest given the whole dinosaur thing in the past.
  - Jensson 3y ago
    The ice age made water animals grow a lot since ice helps concentrate plankton. Earth is cooler today than at almost any other point in history, so makes sense we see bigger water animals today than historically. The ice age did the opposite for land animals, so we have smaller land animals than in history as well.
    - conductr 3y ago
      Never thought of it that way. Thanks friend!
  - Sharlin 3y ago
    It’s vastly easier to be big in water than on the ground as a result of the square–cube law. Indeed it kind of boggles the mind how these gigantic dinosaurs were even able to stand, much less move around.
    - conductr 3y ago
      Yes, I’m surprised that in a time those creatures existed on land something much larger didn’t existed at sea. My rudimentary knowledge of the past was that dinosaurs weren’t some anomaly, everything was large back then. Yet. Our current reality is the largest land animal is oversized by 30x by the blue whale.
    - masklinn 3y ago
      Sauropods were light for their size, the air sacs definitely did a lot of work, though so did much of the size being neck and tail. Argentinosaurus is estimated to have reached 35 metres and 80 tonnes at the upper range, for comparison blue whales top out at 30 meters and 200 tonnes. You can see something similar with giraffes, though without the benefit of tail (or air sacs). Male giraffes average above 5m tall (tallest known was 5.8m — 19ft) compared to a bush elephant's 3.2 (4 at the absolute limit), but the average male giraffe is just 1200kg versus 6000 for elephants. Obviously Sauropods were still bonkers heavy, to a ridiculous degree for land animals.
- sarchertech 3y ago
  Another interesting fact is that the blue whale is also the largest carnivore to ever exist-even though the animals it eats are very small.
  - appplication 3y ago
    I wonder how much algae and plankton a blue whale ends up eating accidentally, and how much of its caloric intake that would represent. It has to be non-zero… but how non-zero I’m unsure.
huytersd 3y ago
Do we have the genetic sequence of any dinosaurs at all? Are we at the point, if we pushed aside ethical considerations, we could bring one to life?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- adr1an 3y ago
  No :'(
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- RodgerTheGreat 3y ago
  The half-life of DNA is about 500 years; the odds of finding any preserved sequences of dinosaur DNA longer than a few base pairs is pretty much nil. Even with very large samples, it simply would not be possible to recover any information from such fragments any more than you could reconstruct a book from a list of the syllables contained in a few million shredded copies. You'd have an easier time modifying the genomes of modern-day birds and reptiles to produce something that looked like dinosaurs, but even this is far beyond the reach of current technology.
  - p1esk 3y ago
    Is that half life temperature dependent?
  - usrnm 3y ago
    > but even this is far beyond the reach of current technology I saw an article not too long ago about creating chicken embrios with teeth. Doesn't seem that far
  - Sharlin 3y ago
    There are some birds even now that are "obviously" theropod dinosaurs (all birds are dinosaurs, but some are phenotypically closer to their ancestors than others). The sauropod lineage is truly dead though – birds are still their closest extant relatives, but the lineages diverged already in the late Triassic, ~230M years ago.
verisimi 3y ago
These creatures seem unfeasible from an engineering perspective. From the image, their substantial head (the weight of a man?) is on the end of a six meter horizontal length (6m is my estimate, from the image). Yes, the body is a big weight, and yes there is the counterbalance of a (relatively small) tail. If I were to hold a small broom, with the brush end away from me, I am only able to do this for a short while - and yet, these creatures spent all their days like this, swaying their heads around as they go! It seems to me that the tension and pain these creatures must have been in because of their design and the effect of gravity would be too great to bear. If we look at something comparable that we know exists, we see a giraffe - these are slightly unfeasible too, but they are far smaller (3m neck?) but the angle of the neck is almost upright, hence there have nothing like the force dinosaurs would have had to bear. It would be good to have a structural engineer go over the numbers for this dinosaur. I would expect a breaking point would be reached, and that there is no way the long neck could support such a heavy head over such a length without failure. We are talking about flesh and bone (which is surely incredible in its way, but holding huge weight up - the head - is not what meat and bone are good for; these are not lengths of metal. PS, apparently a giraffe neck is only 2m, not 3 as I guessed.
- Jensson 3y ago
  > If I were to hold a small broom, with the brush end away from me, I am only able to do this for a short while I can do that for hours, do you mean you hold the broom in only a hand with no other support? Instead consider holding a broom by supporting it with your arm like people held spears, humans held spears that way for hours no problem. This dinosaur was built with the body to optimally support that neck and head, it doesn't have the same issues you have with that broom at all. And it can be that long the same skyscrapers can be so high, by having a big base and being smaller and smaller the further away it gets.
  - verisimi 3y ago
    I'm getting at the fact that the head and neck are nearer to horizontal, not vertical. If you have your arm extended, and are then holding a broom out (or any weight really, or even no weight at all) you cannot hold it in that position for hours. (To me, it sounds like a stress position, a form of torture!) But that was these dinosaurs' design, purportedly. Re spears, the shape has no bearing if you are holding it at its balancing point. Alternatively, imagine building this sort of shape with something like Lego.. its unfeasible to have a 6m horizontal length, then a heavy head, and expect the Lego to not break.
KingOfCoders 3y ago
I've been following dinosaurs for 45 years and learned a lot about science. Too much that ended up in 70s dinosaur children books was wrong, but was presented as scientific facts.
- ghaff 3y ago
  There was a very well-established orthodoxy that you even see in a lot of dinosaur names; they were "lizards." It's hard to step back from that sort of orthodoxy and look at things in a fresh light. It's also professionally difficult to go basically "Umm. I think everyone's been largely wrong for the last 100 years." Arguably relatively and quantum did this in physics but they were arguably refinements on existing knowledge that worked perfectly well to explain and predict most things in everyday life.
  - Jensson 3y ago
    T-Rex with feathers looks just like a giant chicken. Chickens aren't exactly awe inspiring so I think that is part of it. Chickens do ruthlessly hunt mice and other small things so a giant chicken would be really scary, just that our minds don't see them that way. But I can easily see raptors and t-rexes being just giant versions of our chickens with similar feathers, they are so similar in all other aspects.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      Although there were larger raptors, velociraptor was about the size of a turkey--which is indeed one of its closest modern relatives. It got super-sized for Jurassic Park. And I know dinosaur in the general public's eyes conjures up T-Rex and Brontosaurus. But scientists were well aware that the majority of dinosaurs were a lot smaller. But I don't disagree in general that there were a lot of factors that set the orthodoxy in place. Including that there were large (and flying) reptiles.
      - sarchertech 3y ago
        The velociraptor in Jurassic Park was a deinonychus, but Michael Crichton thought velociraptor sounded better.
amai 3y ago
See also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentinosaurus https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentinosaurus
fodmap 3y ago
Somewhat related, I recently enjoyed reading 'New Hunter' by Jack Mantell, a novel set in the Cretaceous period. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/201762017-new-hunter https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/201762017-new-hunter
philipov 3y ago
The caption for every image is cut off so you can't read it...
- card_zero 3y ago
  You can click (or tap) the images or captions to see a full version. On mobile, the first tap brought up a donation request instead, which might perhaps have dissuaded you from trying a second time.
solardev 3y ago
Side story about dinosaurs and AI... I worked at a museum years ago, and one of the projects there was an AI chatbot for a titanosaur: https://www.fieldmuseum.org/exhibitions/maximo-titanosaur https://www.fieldmuseum.org/exhibitions/maximo-titanosaur (near the bottom, the "Message Máximo" section; the web chat seems discontinued, but you can still text him). From a marketing angle, it was interesting enough: a way to bring a fossil to life, giving him a name and a personality, with signage around the exhibition encouraging visitors to text him to ask questions about his past life, diet, tail, etc. From a technical angle, it was a simple system built on Google Dialogflow (https://cloud.google.com/dialogflow?hl=en https://cloud.google.com/dialogflow?hl=en), a natural language parsing and no-code response tree system. This was all before GPTs really came in vogue, so the responses were all human-curated: parsed Dialogflow intent tokens in, highest matching response variants out, all edited in Dialogflow's nice GUI. But what I really liked about it was the scientific angle. There were some serious behind-the-scenes efforts to make his responses scientifically accurate yet easily digestible. That museum was a research institution as well, and had a ton of PhD paleontologists actually researching titanosaurs and other sauropods. This was a way to collect popular questions from the public, filter it through their professional expertise, and then distill that knowledge back down into bite-size chunks suitable for families and kids, all while maintaining scientific integrity. Every week or so, the team would collect the latest questions, points of confusion, etc., and then it run it by the scientists again to update the dialog tree accordingly. If the project were launched today instead, I wonder if it'd be possible to do something similar with a very tightly scoped GPT that could be trained only on the scientific data (published papers, etc.), eliminating or vastly reducing hallucinations, while still giving the GPT limited room to express a personality and not be limited by scripted responses. But there would still have to be a human in the loop to vet those responses for scientific accuracy. Not sure how to best build something like that, but it would be awesome for understaffed museum exhibitions (which is most of them!), a way for the public to be able to ask the exhibition itself questions, instead of hoping a knowledgeable PhD happened to be available right then.
- eternityforest 3y ago
  Is there a FOSS offline DialogFlow equivalent? Art is hard to separate from context and background, and knowing it's just a GPT as opposed to a human written dialogue seems a bit disappointing.

96 points by makerdiety 3y ago

emp_ 3y ago

I remember one day many years ago just snapping wondering what had been the the biggest animal to ever exist on earth, and after a few searches it seems like the consensus was *NOT* a dinosaur but the Blue Whale which still exists today, still think about it from time to time. The article only discusses land animals but I wonder if the blue whale still reigns after more modern discoveries.

boomboomsubban 3y ago
We can't say with certainty that the blue whale is the largest animal ever, but to our knowledge at most there were several other species approximately the same size. And even those are based on estimates with rather huge ranges. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest_and_heaviest_animals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest_and_heaviest_animals
conductr 3y ago
I read a book to my kid regularly that says that fact about blue whales too and I always kind of think it seems odd that it would be the biggest given the whole dinosaur thing in the past.
- Jensson 3y ago
  The ice age made water animals grow a lot since ice helps concentrate plankton. Earth is cooler today than at almost any other point in history, so makes sense we see bigger water animals today than historically. The ice age did the opposite for land animals, so we have smaller land animals than in history as well.
  - conductr 3y ago
    Never thought of it that way. Thanks friend!
- Sharlin 3y ago
  It’s vastly easier to be big in water than on the ground as a result of the square–cube law. Indeed it kind of boggles the mind how these gigantic dinosaurs were even able to stand, much less move around.
  - conductr 3y ago
    Yes, I’m surprised that in a time those creatures existed on land something much larger didn’t existed at sea. My rudimentary knowledge of the past was that dinosaurs weren’t some anomaly, everything was large back then. Yet. Our current reality is the largest land animal is oversized by 30x by the blue whale.
  - masklinn 3y ago
    Sauropods were light for their size, the air sacs definitely did a lot of work, though so did much of the size being neck and tail. Argentinosaurus is estimated to have reached 35 metres and 80 tonnes at the upper range, for comparison blue whales top out at 30 meters and 200 tonnes. You can see something similar with giraffes, though without the benefit of tail (or air sacs). Male giraffes average above 5m tall (tallest known was 5.8m — 19ft) compared to a bush elephant's 3.2 (4 at the absolute limit), but the average male giraffe is just 1200kg versus 6000 for elephants. Obviously Sauropods were still bonkers heavy, to a ridiculous degree for land animals.
sarchertech 3y ago
Another interesting fact is that the blue whale is also the largest carnivore to ever exist-even though the animals it eats are very small.
- appplication 3y ago
  I wonder how much algae and plankton a blue whale ends up eating accidentally, and how much of its caloric intake that would represent. It has to be non-zero… but how non-zero I’m unsure.

huytersd 3y ago

Do we have the genetic sequence of any dinosaurs at all? Are we at the point, if we pushed aside ethical considerations, we could bring one to life?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
adr1an 3y ago
No :'(
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
RodgerTheGreat 3y ago
The half-life of DNA is about 500 years; the odds of finding any preserved sequences of dinosaur DNA longer than a few base pairs is pretty much nil. Even with very large samples, it simply would not be possible to recover any information from such fragments any more than you could reconstruct a book from a list of the syllables contained in a few million shredded copies. You'd have an easier time modifying the genomes of modern-day birds and reptiles to produce something that looked like dinosaurs, but even this is far beyond the reach of current technology.
- p1esk 3y ago
  Is that half life temperature dependent?
- usrnm 3y ago
  > but even this is far beyond the reach of current technology I saw an article not too long ago about creating chicken embrios with teeth. Doesn't seem that far
- Sharlin 3y ago
  There are some birds even now that are "obviously" theropod dinosaurs (all birds are dinosaurs, but some are phenotypically closer to their ancestors than others). The sauropod lineage is truly dead though – birds are still their closest extant relatives, but the lineages diverged already in the late Triassic, ~230M years ago.

verisimi 3y ago

These creatures seem unfeasible from an engineering perspective. From the image, their substantial head (the weight of a man?) is on the end of a six meter horizontal length (6m is my estimate, from the image). Yes, the body is a big weight, and yes there is the counterbalance of a (relatively small) tail. If I were to hold a small broom, with the brush end away from me, I am only able to do this for a short while - and yet, these creatures spent all their days like this, swaying their heads around as they go! It seems to me that the tension and pain these creatures must have been in because of their design and the effect of gravity would be too great to bear. If we look at something comparable that we know exists, we see a giraffe - these are slightly unfeasible too, but they are far smaller (3m neck?) but the angle of the neck is almost upright, hence there have nothing like the force dinosaurs would have had to bear. It would be good to have a structural engineer go over the numbers for this dinosaur. I would expect a breaking point would be reached, and that there is no way the long neck could support such a heavy head over such a length without failure. We are talking about flesh and bone (which is surely incredible in its way, but holding huge weight up - the head - is not what meat and bone are good for; these are not lengths of metal. PS, apparently a giraffe neck is only 2m, not 3 as I guessed.

Jensson 3y ago
> If I were to hold a small broom, with the brush end away from me, I am only able to do this for a short while I can do that for hours, do you mean you hold the broom in only a hand with no other support? Instead consider holding a broom by supporting it with your arm like people held spears, humans held spears that way for hours no problem. This dinosaur was built with the body to optimally support that neck and head, it doesn't have the same issues you have with that broom at all. And it can be that long the same skyscrapers can be so high, by having a big base and being smaller and smaller the further away it gets.
- verisimi 3y ago
  I'm getting at the fact that the head and neck are nearer to horizontal, not vertical. If you have your arm extended, and are then holding a broom out (or any weight really, or even no weight at all) you cannot hold it in that position for hours. (To me, it sounds like a stress position, a form of torture!) But that was these dinosaurs' design, purportedly. Re spears, the shape has no bearing if you are holding it at its balancing point. Alternatively, imagine building this sort of shape with something like Lego.. its unfeasible to have a 6m horizontal length, then a heavy head, and expect the Lego to not break.

KingOfCoders 3y ago

I've been following dinosaurs for 45 years and learned a lot about science. Too much that ended up in 70s dinosaur children books was wrong, but was presented as scientific facts.

ghaff 3y ago
There was a very well-established orthodoxy that you even see in a lot of dinosaur names; they were "lizards." It's hard to step back from that sort of orthodoxy and look at things in a fresh light. It's also professionally difficult to go basically "Umm. I think everyone's been largely wrong for the last 100 years." Arguably relatively and quantum did this in physics but they were arguably refinements on existing knowledge that worked perfectly well to explain and predict most things in everyday life.
- Jensson 3y ago
  T-Rex with feathers looks just like a giant chicken. Chickens aren't exactly awe inspiring so I think that is part of it. Chickens do ruthlessly hunt mice and other small things so a giant chicken would be really scary, just that our minds don't see them that way. But I can easily see raptors and t-rexes being just giant versions of our chickens with similar feathers, they are so similar in all other aspects.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    Although there were larger raptors, velociraptor was about the size of a turkey--which is indeed one of its closest modern relatives. It got super-sized for Jurassic Park. And I know dinosaur in the general public's eyes conjures up T-Rex and Brontosaurus. But scientists were well aware that the majority of dinosaurs were a lot smaller. But I don't disagree in general that there were a lot of factors that set the orthodoxy in place. Including that there were large (and flying) reptiles.
    - sarchertech 3y ago
      The velociraptor in Jurassic Park was a deinonychus, but Michael Crichton thought velociraptor sounded better.

amai 3y ago

See also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentinosaurus https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentinosaurus

fodmap 3y ago

Somewhat related, I recently enjoyed reading 'New Hunter' by Jack Mantell, a novel set in the Cretaceous period. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/201762017-new-hunter https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/201762017-new-hunter

philipov 3y ago

The caption for every image is cut off so you can't read it...

card_zero 3y ago
You can click (or tap) the images or captions to see a full version. On mobile, the first tap brought up a donation request instead, which might perhaps have dissuaded you from trying a second time.

solardev 3y ago

Side story about dinosaurs and AI... I worked at a museum years ago, and one of the projects there was an AI chatbot for a titanosaur: https://www.fieldmuseum.org/exhibitions/maximo-titanosaur https://www.fieldmuseum.org/exhibitions/maximo-titanosaur (near the bottom, the "Message Máximo" section; the web chat seems discontinued, but you can still text him). From a marketing angle, it was interesting enough: a way to bring a fossil to life, giving him a name and a personality, with signage around the exhibition encouraging visitors to text him to ask questions about his past life, diet, tail, etc. From a technical angle, it was a simple system built on Google Dialogflow (https://cloud.google.com/dialogflow?hl=en https://cloud.google.com/dialogflow?hl=en), a natural language parsing and no-code response tree system. This was all before GPTs really came in vogue, so the responses were all human-curated: parsed Dialogflow intent tokens in, highest matching response variants out, all edited in Dialogflow's nice GUI. But what I really liked about it was the scientific angle. There were some serious behind-the-scenes efforts to make his responses scientifically accurate yet easily digestible. That museum was a research institution as well, and had a ton of PhD paleontologists actually researching titanosaurs and other sauropods. This was a way to collect popular questions from the public, filter it through their professional expertise, and then distill that knowledge back down into bite-size chunks suitable for families and kids, all while maintaining scientific integrity. Every week or so, the team would collect the latest questions, points of confusion, etc., and then it run it by the scientists again to update the dialog tree accordingly. If the project were launched today instead, I wonder if it'd be possible to do something similar with a very tightly scoped GPT that could be trained only on the scientific data (published papers, etc.), eliminating or vastly reducing hallucinations, while still giving the GPT limited room to express a personality and not be limited by scripted responses. But there would still have to be a human in the loop to vet those responses for scientific accuracy. Not sure how to best build something like that, but it would be awesome for understaffed museum exhibitions (which is most of them!), a way for the public to be able to ask the exhibition itself questions, instead of hoping a knowledgeable PhD happened to be available right then.

eternityforest 3y ago
Is there a FOSS offline DialogFlow equivalent? Art is hard to separate from context and background, and knowing it's just a GPT as opposed to a human written dialogue seems a bit disappointing.