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'Biggest dinosaur ever' discovered
- jschuur 12y agoNature has an order.
- blisterpeanuts 12y agoWe need to clone these beasts. Would love to have grilled dino meat some day!
- brokenparser 12y agoWhat could possibly go wrong?
- autodidakto 12y agoCue Weird Al's "Jurassic Park"
- webwielder 12y agoWell, that's one reason to bring back extinct animals from hundreds of millions of years ago.
- Yetanfou 12y agoWhy bother, it'll taste like chicken anyway...
- Yetanfou 12y agoHmmm, 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 agoBut dinosaurs share a common ancester with humans. And we taste like pork, not chicken.
- Torn 12y agoWhat 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
- blisterpeanuts 12y agoChickens share a lot of DNA with Tyrannosaurus Rex. They used to eat us. Now we eat them. One of the great ironies of evolution.
- mcv 12y agoI think diet may have a far bigger impact on taste than genetic similarity. Cows and pigs are far more closely related than chickens and sauropods, yet they taste very differently. Also, plenty of birds don't taste all that much like chicken.
- blisterpeanuts 12y agoFYI, my comment was a nebulous reference to "Steel Beach" by John Varley, about a future space civilization where dinosaurs had been cloned and were raised as game meat. No sense of humor around here, looks like. The fact is, if we could revive dinosaurs, they would become game meat. What other purpose would they serve? To strip a forest in a day? To hunt and kill all the mammals? As for the fundamental question of whether we should revive ancient species, the answer is "Of course!" To clone an animal using fully sequenced DNA would be an amazing achievement, and the programmed behavior in the DNA would be fascinating to study. Of course, it's much more likely and scientifically feasible that we could clone more recent species such as Neanderthals which according to at least one scientist might be achievable today, or in the very near future. But dinosaurs are what capture people's imagination, and the bigger, the better.
- HillOBeans 12y agoDoes 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 agoSure 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 agoI 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 agoThe 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
- spindritf 12y agoSo 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 agoI 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 agoNo. One man was big. Or it might have been a fraud.
- eponeponepon 12y agoNothing 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 agoThe 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 agoSea 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 agoIt is pretty amazing that despite all those ancient giants of unimaginable size, the largest animal ever exists right now.
- pdevr 12y agoFrom 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 agoThat 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 agoGot it, thanks to your and tootie's replies.
- tootie 12y agoKeep 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.
- jcromartie 12y agoI'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.