6 ms·

'Biggest dinosaur ever' discovered

112 points by namzo 12y ago

HillOBeans 12y ago
Does anyone else here ever wonder if some of these "new" dinosaurs are really just re-discoveries of known dinosaurs? The article even mentions that the skeletal remains are incomplete. What if a number of these sauropods are really all the same species, albeit at different stages of their life? Is size alone enough to create a new classification? Perhaps growth continued throughout the life of a sauropod, and the largest ones were just the oldest?
- dm2 12y ago
  Sure it's possible. The scientists that study this kind of thing try to check for similarities and classify them as the same or different when appropriate. They probably classify them as different if the time they lived (based on the surrounding rock they were found in) or their bone structures is sufficiently different from anything previously discovered. It's also a lot easier to merge two classifications rather than split a group into two. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanosauriformes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanosauriformes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sauropoda http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sauropoda
- privong 12y ago
  I don't think species are classified solely on size. I'm pretty sure juvenile specimens have been discovered and identified as being the same species as the adult specimens. Yes, mistakes have been made, but my impression is that the bone shapes play a substantial and important role, perhaps moreso than just the size.
  - theoh 12y ago
    The idea that you can determine the size of an animal from a single bone comes from Cuvier and was an early development in paleontology. I don't know how much progress there has been on the task of putting it on a firm scientific footing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Cuvier#Principle_of_the_correlation_of_parts http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Cuvier#Principle_of_the...
    - Retric 12y ago
      Lower leg bones are likely to directly relate to body weight where say teeth on the other extreme have little to so with it. Overall, it's note quite BS because it can be somewhat true. Ex: Sabertooth cat and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narwhal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narwhal
- mediocregopher 12y ago
  I think you'll find this ted talk interesting, as it explores that exact idea: http://www.ted.com/talks/jack_horner_shape_shifting_dinosaurs http://www.ted.com/talks/jack_horner_shape_shifting_dinosaur... It's also pretty entertaining to watch
  - HillOBeans 12y ago
    Yes. This. This is exactly the sort of thing I was thinking...
- mapt 12y ago
  So the problem is - the very concept of a species is not particularly well defined, and loses a large degree of meaning in paleontology amidst lack of fossil-record data (both extreme scarcity and geographical patchiness) and the additional dimension of time. A species is a particular genetic type which does not routinely interbreed with other related types it encounters, and retains some physiological differences from them, as a forked, internally consistent genetic branch. We're a hundred million years late to demonstrate that the sauropods were or weren't interbreeding. We don't have that behavior to observe. We don't have any DNA, a fairly accurate way of demonstrating breeding pools, to work with. We only have the occasional left third rib, and equations derived from the most similar complete skeletons we know of. Even when we do find a complete skeleton, we can only date it to a certain degree of precision, and while understanding that there is an evolutionary tree that is constantly sprouting and changing branches, we have nothing to really demarcate when one species "becomes" another - we are speculating about two specimens' reproductive compatibility with millions of years between them. Could you breed with a proto-human? Would you? How far back? Would the kids come out alright? Would you call them a new subspecies or pick one of the parents' taxonomy? On top of that, to represent the last several millions of years of subtle changes, new branches, & trimmed branches in hominid genetics, what if you only have 6 specimens closer than chimpanzees, mostly age/sex-indeterminate, only one of which is a complete skeleton? How do you draw an org chart of the hominids then? There are size variations corresponding to age and gender, heritable variations within a breeding pool, variations corresponding to differential nutrition & the good times vs the bad times for a population, variations corresponding to individual sickness and injury, variations corresponding to the entire population getting steadily larger or smaller for a thousand or thirty thousand or a million years, variations corresponding to sudden changes in habit associated with adaptations to rapid changes in environment, variations corresponding to drift from a parent population associated with permanent reproductive incompatibility as well as reversible reproductive isolation. The historical paleontological record is thousands of times richer in micro-scale detail than we have the data to describe, even if we did have good words to describe it with that the popular media could understand. But they want to talk in terms of species, because that's what people are familiar with.
spindritf 12y ago
So what's their secret? How did they manage to feed themselves? Were they living sparsely? Was bioshpere denser then? Were they capable of eating just about anything? And how was such massive size selected for? Is it just a matter of warmer climate and a feedback loop with larger and larger predators?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- givan 12y ago
  I don't know what was different before but also humans were bigger http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_of_Castelnau http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_of_Castelnau
  - noselasd 12y ago
    No. One man was big. Or it might have been a fraud.
  - eponeponepon 12y ago
    Nothing was different. The "Giant of Castelnau", even if he/she was actually as tall as the discoverer conjectured, wasn't wildly outwith the recorded range of human height - Robert Wadlow was 8'11" (2.72m) when he died, and was only 22. It's completely plausible to me that someone afflicted by the same disorder as Wadlow could've reached 3.5m just by being lucky enough to live longer, and it's also completely plausible to me that it could've happened more than once in the vast, vast swathe of human history about which we know next to nothing. Scant evidence that a human was once very large certainly isn't evidence that "humans were bigger", and that in turn wouldn't be much evidence that a difference in the environment was causing it.
    - learc83 12y ago
      >It's completely plausible to me that someone afflicted by the same disorder as Wadlow could've reached 3.5m just by being lucky enough to live longer, That's not plausible at all. Robert Wadlow as at the very limits of human height. He already numerous medical problems caused by his height and needed leg braces just to walk. There is no way a bronze age man with access to bronze age medical care was able to live long enough to grow nearly 3 feet taller than Wadlow. Since weight doesn't scale linearly with height, a 12' tall man would be enormous. Robert wadlow weighed nearly 500 pounds. A 12' tall man would weigh much much more than that. I think there are only 2 real possibilities to explain the giant. Either he wasn't really as tall as the discoverer thought, or something was different to allow him to get that tall.
dfc 12y ago
The crazy thing is despite being 10 meters longer than a blue whale this puny landlubber is still 100 tonnes lighter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_whale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_whale
- dredmorbius 12y ago
  Sea creatures don't need to support their own weight. Though I'm anything but expert on the topic, my understanding is that many dinosaurs were surprisingly light-weight for their size, and masses of many dinosaurs have been revised downward. As ancestors of birds, whose own bodies are generally of very low mass, and incorporate interesting features (hollow bones and internal air sacs) this isn't entirely surprising.
- mcv 12y ago
  It is pretty amazing that despite all those ancient giants of unimaginable size, the largest animal ever exists right now.
pdevr 12y ago
From the BBC article: Weighing in at 77 tonnes, it was as heavy as 14 African elephants, and seven tonnes heavier than the previous record holder, Argentinosaurus. According to the Wikipedia page about Dinosaur size[1], the biggest (and longest) dinosaur is Amphicoelias fragillimus (at 122 tons), not Argentinosaurus. So, won't this new dinosaur be the second heaviest? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinosaur_size#Heaviest_dinosaurs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinosaur_size#Heaviest_dinosaur...
- Zitrax 12y ago
  That estimate seem to have been based on a single bone that was described in the 1870s, a bone that is now lost. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amphicoelias_fragillimus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amphicoelias_fragillimus
  - pdevr 12y ago
    Got it, thanks to your and tootie's replies.
- tootie 12y ago
  Keep reading. There was only one fossil found and described in the 19th century, then lost. The results can't be verified and the size estimate may be completely wrong.
jschuur 12y ago
Nature has an order.
blisterpeanuts 12y ago
We need to clone these beasts. Would love to have grilled dino meat some day!
- webwielder 12y ago
  Well, that's one reason to bring back extinct animals from hundreds of millions of years ago.
- Yetanfou 12y ago
  Why bother, it'll taste like chicken anyway...
  - Yetanfou 12y ago
    Hmmm, judging by the number of down-votes on my "it'll taste like chicken" comment I have the feeling I need to remind some of the evolutionary grandparents of the humble chicken. Remember that chickens, being birds, most likely are descended from small carnivorous dinosaurs. While the mentioned dinosaur is a vegetarian sauropod, both share a common ancestor.
    - DanBC 12y ago
      But dinosaurs share a common ancester with humans. And we taste like pork, not chicken.
      - Torn 12y ago
        What common ancestor? You risk going so far back your suggestion is meaningless
        dredmorbius 12y ago
        ~ 320 - 315 mya, amniotes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_mammals#The_ancestry_of_mammals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_mammals#The_ances... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amniote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amniote
jcromartie 12y ago
I'm really fascinated by the possibilities of paleontological discoveries. We have excavated such a minuscule portion of our planet (you might just round it down to 0%) that there absolutely must be an enormous amount of fantastic things out there waiting to be discovered. I hope we can develop things like clear underground imaging from aircraft, and start finding more and more of these incredible types of discoveries.

112 points by namzo 12y ago

Does anyone else here ever wonder if some of these "new" dinosaurs are really just re-discoveries of known dinosaurs? The article even mentions that the skeletal remains are incomplete. What if a number of these sauropods are really all the same species, albeit at different stages of their life? Is size alone enough to create a new classification? Perhaps growth continued throughout the life of a sauropod, and the largest ones were just the oldest?

dm2 12y ago
Sure it's possible. The scientists that study this kind of thing try to check for similarities and classify them as the same or different when appropriate. They probably classify them as different if the time they lived (based on the surrounding rock they were found in) or their bone structures is sufficiently different from anything previously discovered. It's also a lot easier to merge two classifications rather than split a group into two. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanosauriformes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanosauriformes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sauropoda http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sauropoda
privong 12y ago
I don't think species are classified solely on size. I'm pretty sure juvenile specimens have been discovered and identified as being the same species as the adult specimens. Yes, mistakes have been made, but my impression is that the bone shapes play a substantial and important role, perhaps moreso than just the size.
- theoh 12y ago
  The idea that you can determine the size of an animal from a single bone comes from Cuvier and was an early development in paleontology. I don't know how much progress there has been on the task of putting it on a firm scientific footing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Cuvier#Principle_of_the_correlation_of_parts http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Cuvier#Principle_of_the...
  - Retric 12y ago
    Lower leg bones are likely to directly relate to body weight where say teeth on the other extreme have little to so with it. Overall, it's note quite BS because it can be somewhat true. Ex: Sabertooth cat and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narwhal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narwhal
mediocregopher 12y ago
I think you'll find this ted talk interesting, as it explores that exact idea: http://www.ted.com/talks/jack_horner_shape_shifting_dinosaurs http://www.ted.com/talks/jack_horner_shape_shifting_dinosaur... It's also pretty entertaining to watch
- HillOBeans 12y ago
  Yes. This. This is exactly the sort of thing I was thinking...
mapt 12y ago
So the problem is - the very concept of a species is not particularly well defined, and loses a large degree of meaning in paleontology amidst lack of fossil-record data (both extreme scarcity and geographical patchiness) and the additional dimension of time. A species is a particular genetic type which does not routinely interbreed with other related types it encounters, and retains some physiological differences from them, as a forked, internally consistent genetic branch. We're a hundred million years late to demonstrate that the sauropods were or weren't interbreeding. We don't have that behavior to observe. We don't have any DNA, a fairly accurate way of demonstrating breeding pools, to work with. We only have the occasional left third rib, and equations derived from the most similar complete skeletons we know of. Even when we do find a complete skeleton, we can only date it to a certain degree of precision, and while understanding that there is an evolutionary tree that is constantly sprouting and changing branches, we have nothing to really demarcate when one species "becomes" another - we are speculating about two specimens' reproductive compatibility with millions of years between them. Could you breed with a proto-human? Would you? How far back? Would the kids come out alright? Would you call them a new subspecies or pick one of the parents' taxonomy? On top of that, to represent the last several millions of years of subtle changes, new branches, & trimmed branches in hominid genetics, what if you only have 6 specimens closer than chimpanzees, mostly age/sex-indeterminate, only one of which is a complete skeleton? How do you draw an org chart of the hominids then? There are size variations corresponding to age and gender, heritable variations within a breeding pool, variations corresponding to differential nutrition & the good times vs the bad times for a population, variations corresponding to individual sickness and injury, variations corresponding to the entire population getting steadily larger or smaller for a thousand or thirty thousand or a million years, variations corresponding to sudden changes in habit associated with adaptations to rapid changes in environment, variations corresponding to drift from a parent population associated with permanent reproductive incompatibility as well as reversible reproductive isolation. The historical paleontological record is thousands of times richer in micro-scale detail than we have the data to describe, even if we did have good words to describe it with that the popular media could understand. But they want to talk in terms of species, because that's what people are familiar with.

spindritf 12y ago

So what's their secret? How did they manage to feed themselves? Were they living sparsely? Was bioshpere denser then? Were they capable of eating just about anything? And how was such massive size selected for? Is it just a matter of warmer climate and a feedback loop with larger and larger predators?

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
givan 12y ago
I don't know what was different before but also humans were bigger http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_of_Castelnau http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_of_Castelnau
- noselasd 12y ago
  No. One man was big. Or it might have been a fraud.
- eponeponepon 12y ago
  Nothing was different. The "Giant of Castelnau", even if he/she was actually as tall as the discoverer conjectured, wasn't wildly outwith the recorded range of human height - Robert Wadlow was 8'11" (2.72m) when he died, and was only 22. It's completely plausible to me that someone afflicted by the same disorder as Wadlow could've reached 3.5m just by being lucky enough to live longer, and it's also completely plausible to me that it could've happened more than once in the vast, vast swathe of human history about which we know next to nothing. Scant evidence that a human was once very large certainly isn't evidence that "humans were bigger", and that in turn wouldn't be much evidence that a difference in the environment was causing it.
  - learc83 12y ago
    >It's completely plausible to me that someone afflicted by the same disorder as Wadlow could've reached 3.5m just by being lucky enough to live longer, That's not plausible at all. Robert Wadlow as at the very limits of human height. He already numerous medical problems caused by his height and needed leg braces just to walk. There is no way a bronze age man with access to bronze age medical care was able to live long enough to grow nearly 3 feet taller than Wadlow. Since weight doesn't scale linearly with height, a 12' tall man would be enormous. Robert wadlow weighed nearly 500 pounds. A 12' tall man would weigh much much more than that. I think there are only 2 real possibilities to explain the giant. Either he wasn't really as tall as the discoverer thought, or something was different to allow him to get that tall.

dfc 12y ago

The crazy thing is despite being 10 meters longer than a blue whale this puny landlubber is still 100 tonnes lighter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_whale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_whale

dredmorbius 12y ago
Sea creatures don't need to support their own weight. Though I'm anything but expert on the topic, my understanding is that many dinosaurs were surprisingly light-weight for their size, and masses of many dinosaurs have been revised downward. As ancestors of birds, whose own bodies are generally of very low mass, and incorporate interesting features (hollow bones and internal air sacs) this isn't entirely surprising.
mcv 12y ago
It is pretty amazing that despite all those ancient giants of unimaginable size, the largest animal ever exists right now.

pdevr 12y ago

From the BBC article: Weighing in at 77 tonnes, it was as heavy as 14 African elephants, and seven tonnes heavier than the previous record holder, Argentinosaurus. According to the Wikipedia page about Dinosaur size[1], the biggest (and longest) dinosaur is Amphicoelias fragillimus (at 122 tons), not Argentinosaurus. So, won't this new dinosaur be the second heaviest? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinosaur_size#Heaviest_dinosaurs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinosaur_size#Heaviest_dinosaur...

Zitrax 12y ago
That estimate seem to have been based on a single bone that was described in the 1870s, a bone that is now lost. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amphicoelias_fragillimus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amphicoelias_fragillimus
- pdevr 12y ago
  Got it, thanks to your and tootie's replies.
tootie 12y ago
Keep reading. There was only one fossil found and described in the 19th century, then lost. The results can't be verified and the size estimate may be completely wrong.

jschuur 12y ago

Nature has an order.

blisterpeanuts 12y ago

We need to clone these beasts. Would love to have grilled dino meat some day!

webwielder 12y ago
Well, that's one reason to bring back extinct animals from hundreds of millions of years ago.
Yetanfou 12y ago
Why bother, it'll taste like chicken anyway...
- Yetanfou 12y ago
  Hmmm, judging by the number of down-votes on my "it'll taste like chicken" comment I have the feeling I need to remind some of the evolutionary grandparents of the humble chicken. Remember that chickens, being birds, most likely are descended from small carnivorous dinosaurs. While the mentioned dinosaur is a vegetarian sauropod, both share a common ancestor.
  - DanBC 12y ago
    But dinosaurs share a common ancester with humans. And we taste like pork, not chicken.
    - Torn 12y ago
      What common ancestor? You risk going so far back your suggestion is meaningless
      - dredmorbius 12y ago
        ~ 320 - 315 mya, amniotes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_mammals#The_ancestry_of_mammals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_mammals#The_ances... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amniote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amniote

jcromartie 12y ago

I'm really fascinated by the possibilities of paleontological discoveries. We have excavated such a minuscule portion of our planet (you might just round it down to 0%) that there absolutely must be an enormous amount of fantastic things out there waiting to be discovered. I hope we can develop things like clear underground imaging from aircraft, and start finding more and more of these incredible types of discoveries.