The researchers report that Dreadnoughtus weighed almost 60 tonnes, was two storeys tall at the shoulder, and measured a massive 26-metres long long from nose to tail. The fossil was discovered in the southern Patagonia region of Argentina in 2005, and it’s the largest fossil mass of a single organism ever uncovered.
“It weighed as much as a dozen African elephants or more than seven T. rex. Shockingly, skeletal evidence shows that when this [specimen] died, it was not yet full grown. It is by far the best example we have of any of the most giant creatures to ever walk the planet,” Kenneth Lacovara, an associate professor at Drexel University, in California, who discovered the fossil, said in a press release.
Dreadnoughtus appears to have lived in the late Cretaceous Periods (around 77 million years ago) in high-altitude and forested valleys, and is part of a group of large herbivores known as titanosaurs. Despite the size of titanosaurs, scientists still know very little about them, and this is the largest fossil ever found of one of the giant species.
“For the [largest] dinosaurs, which we call titanosaurs, finding anything around 20 percent of the fossil is usually considered a home run,” Lacovara told William Herkewitz, a journalist for Popular Mechanics. “Normally you only find a handful of bones, and the previous record was a 27 percent complete skeleton. With Dreadnoughtus we found 70 percent.”
Dreadnoughtus’s fossils are so huge that it took four annual trips to get them all out of the ground, and another four years of cleaning and prep before the specimen could be studied.
For scale, here is Lacovara photographed against the right tibia (shin bone) of Dreadnoughtus.