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65 Ton Dreadnoughtus Schrani Ruled the Jurassic

By Peter R | Update Date: Sep 08, 2014 06:17 PM EDT

At 85 feet long and weighing 65 tons, Dreadnoughtus Schrani, may have been the largest dinosaur that walked earth.

The discovery of the dinosaur, a sauropoad that walked on four and thrived on plants, began in 2005 in Argentina, with the sighting of just one bone. By 2009 a team of paleontologists had unearthed 145 bones, Fox News reports.

"It turned out to be a 6-foot-plus-long femur, which was nice, but I kind of figured that this was going to be an isolated bone. And then we uncovered the tibia, and then we uncovered the fibula. By the end of the day, we had 10 bones exposed. And four years later, we had 145 bones exposed," Ken Lacovara, a paleontologist at Philadelphia's Drexel University who led the research said, according to Fox News.

The find was heralded by other experts, for it is among the few discoveries of large dinosaurs were nearly 70 % of the bones of an animal were found. The site in Argentina where Dreadnoughtus was discovered, had two animals entombed, supposedly by a flood 77 million years ago, the research team concluded.

"It's a really important discovery. The glimpses we have of those giant, giant dinosaurs are pretty fleeting. Dreadnoughtus will serve as a key to understanding all those other, more fragmentary specimens," Stony Brook University paleontologist Michael D'Emic told USA Today.

The sheer size of Dreadnoughtus, named after 20th century warships, could dissuade any predator from coming close. The T-Rex, Jurassic's most feared predator, could be killed instantly if Dreadnoughts leaned on it, Lacovara pointed out to USA Today.

Following the announcement of Dreadnoughtus discovery last week, another group of researchers hit up on the remains of another large dinosaur, Rukwatitan Bisepultus, in Africa. Discovery News reports that the researchers discovered ribs, pelvic bones, vertebrae and forelimbs that stood at 6.5 feet in a cliff wall in Tanzania.

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