A rchive Date
[ 07-06-2000 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Argentina ]
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[New dino the biggest yet
Partial remains uncovered in Argentina
Friday, January 21, 2000
Sereno pushes 'back the veil' on the southern continents Skull of the Herrerasaurus, a smaller sauropod than the newly discovered dinosaur.
BUENOS AIRES (AP) -- Scientists working in the remote Patagonia region of Argentina said they have discovered partial remains of what may be the largest dinosaur species on record.
Carlos Munoz, director of the Florentino Ameghino Museum of Natural Sciences, said Thursday a team of paleontologists unearthed the bones of a huge plant-eating dinosaur thought to have roamed the Earth some 105 million years ago.
The dinosaur is believed to have stretched between 48 metres and 50 metres from head to tail and weighed about 10 tonnes. The creature is said to have been eight metres longer than the 100-tonne Argentinosaurus, considered by some experts to be the largest dinosaur ever recorded.
The new dinosaur, which had a small head and a lengthy tail, has yet to be named or classified, Munoz said.
Munoz said scientists working on a tip from a villager found a femur and two parts of a vertebra. The pieces of cervical vertebrae were nearly one metre high, he said.
"This is a spectacular find," said Munoz, whose team of nine students is still working in the remote area near the city of Neuquen, 1,030 kilometres southwest of the capital Buenos Aires.
Munoz said his team would continue to dig until the end of the month before returning to the museum to clean and classify what they uncovered. The scientists plan to officially release their findings in March in an Argentine paleontology magazine.
John McIntosh, a dinosaur expert at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., said in a telephone interview if the new creature truly did reach 50 metres in length, "it certainly would be the largest dinosaur yet recorded."
But paleontologists said there are different ways of measuring the biggest dinosaur, which might add some controversy to the Patagonia discovery.
Though possible shorter, the Argentinosaurus would have been as much as 10-times heavier than the new dinosaur, scientists estimate. And in November, researchers at the University of Oklahoma reported the discovery of a 55-tonne, 18-metre-tall, giraffe-like creature that lived 100 million years ago along an ancient seacoast in what is now the south-central United States. Those measurements would give that dinosaur, called Sauroposeidon, the greatest height and longest neck -- 12 metres -- of any recorded species, researcher Richard Cifelli said. ]
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