A recent article has been circulating the
internet. From well reputed Science news sources like Phys.org and
FromQuarksToQuasars.com all the way to publications as wide reaching as The New
York Times, The Guardian, and even BBC News, everyone is talking about a story
as old as time itself.
The dinosaurs.
But it isn’t just any old dinosaur they’re
talking about. It’s thought to be the discovery of an all new one, something
that hasn’t been done in quite a while. Not only is it the prospect that a new
species may have just been unearthed that has scientists excited, but of the
genus of Titanosaurs we currently know about (we’ll talk more about that later)
this may in fact be the largest.
The Tyrannosaur? He’s a sissy compared to the
lumbering skyscrapers we’re going to be talking about today. Come with me at To
Infinity and…In Theory today as I rekindle an ancient love affair with
dinosaurs. We’ll talk about the time period in which these behemoths roamed,
some of the biggest one’s ever, and break a few misconceptions brought about by
“Jurassic Park”. But first, the recent discovery in Argentina.
The
Desert Titan of Patagonia
Discovered by a farmer in the desert of La
Flecha, Patagonia in the South American country of Argentina was quite the
remarkable find. Protruding from the soil was a bone, when he dug around it he
found it was a really, really big bone. Making the right call, the farmer
called in Paleontologist team Dr Jose Luis Carballido and Dr Diego Pol, from
the Museum of Paleontology.
They went to work immediately excavating the
monster and what they found was more than remarkable. It was the find for
paleontology this decade. While it
wasn’t fully intact there were enough remains left to determine this was a
separate species from what was thought to be the largest Sauropod ever, the
Argentinosaurus. This beast, originally thought to weigh 100 tons, was later
after closer review dropped to the now accepted weight of 70 tons. This new guy
buried in the dirt above? Somewhere between 77 and 100 tons. Regardless of
which article you believe, it beat the old record by 14,000 pounds. Kudos new
guy, kudos.
It’s rare to find a complete skeleton of
these long lost Titans. Why you ask? Smaller dinosaurs fossilize rather
quickly, leaving the skeletal remains well preserved and observable millennia
later for us. Larger ones however decay at a slower rate, leaving the bones
more susceptible to biodegradation before fossilization. Parts are usually
recoverable but discoveries like this are rare.
So how do they calculate its weight? Well it
would be nice to a fully preserved dinosaur for them to weigh but alas that’s
not the case. The good news is there were over 100 bones recovered, which means
there’s enough there this time to make an educated guess. Once the bones are
weighed and scanned into a computer, the computer uses mathematical algorithms
to fill in the blanks for the missing bones, calculate based on size and mass
how big its internal organs would have to be to allow it to function, add
muscle, fat, and skin, and then give them a weight estimate.
You can also do all this complex math by hand
as well. Regardless of how you come to this conclusion one fact is undeniable,
this dinosaur was huge! The good news
is a pod of them won’t be stomping through your neighborhood any time soon.
They died out 100 million years ago. And it’s a good thing everything from that
period was pretty much wiped out,
otherwise we’d probably never have existed as we do now. So when exactly was
this period of massive monstrosity occupation?
The Cretaceous Period.
Epoch…Not
2Pac…
So yeah, a little over a 100 million years
ago, that was a thing, and a regular one at that. If you were an herbivore it
wasn’t uncommon to get chewed on by something a lot bigger than you, and every
time we think we reach the top of the food chain, a new discovery and Carbon
dating smacks us right back into our place. But just when was this strange
period that produced the largest dinosaurs ever discovered?
And why is this time period so important?
Because without it, we wouldn’t be here.
While the factors began to pile up millions of years before this in the
Jurassic era, toward the end of the Cretaceous era, we saw the beginnings of
what we see around us now. It all started with a really bad breakup.
At one point in history, all the landmasses
of Earth were connected into one supercontinent called Pangea. As the plates on
the ocean floor shifted, volcanoes and Earthquakes continued to shape the
Earth, the landmasses split and began to shift apart. Because of this shifting,
over the course of millions of years something remarkable happened. Life began
to evolve.
When faced with natural extinction, organisms
have an incredible ability to adapt. Some don’t and die out, but most develop
spectacular new coping mechanisms to make the best of the situation. Plants
during this time period, (that lasted between 145 to 66 million years ago),
showed signs of their first flower producing varieties. Birds and insects as we
know them now began to appear, and this era marked the end of dinosaurs as they knew them.
The key in all this were the flowering
plants. With those came the diversification of insects and the evolution of the
bee to feed off of these flowers. With pollination now occurring fruits and
other edible flora began to develop and with this foraging became easier and
evolution began to adjust to such. At least, that would be the theory.
Regardless of the school of thought on such
matters one fact remains. The Cretaceous period saw some of the biggest and
baddest creatures to ever walk this Earth. From tree-eating quadrupeds to
eviscerating raptors, let’s look at some of the long lost lizards of this
epoch.
Remember
the Titans
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As I mentioned above this era saw some of the
biggest and most awe inspiring dinosaurs of all time. So what were some of
these creatures excavated from around the world? Wait no longer because we’re
about to talk about many of them today, starting with the now second biggest
Sauropod to ever roam the land, the Argentinosaurus.
The Argentinosaurus
Discovered accidentally by Rancher Guillermo
Heredia in 1987 in Argentina, the Argentinosaurus was originally thought to be
a piece of petrified wood. Upon closer inspection however, all the pieces of
this massive Sauropod started coming together. Like the most recent discovery
of his larger brethren, a full skeleton has never been recovered of the
Argentinosaurus due to its decomposition rate.
A reconstruction has been made however
substituting the missing parts for fabricated copies. Estimations for its
weight has ranged everywhere from 68 to 100 tons but the widely accepted theory
is around 73 tons. That’s still absolutely ginormous considering it was a land
animal that at one point walked this planet where our Starbucks are currently
located.
The Argentinosaurus is a Titanosaur Sauropod.
The Titanosaurs reigned from the Jurassic to the end of the Cretaceous period
and like their mythological namesake of Titans, were the largest of the
herbivore class. While the Titanosaurs were abnormally large, you didn’t
necessarily have to be classified as a giant to be a Sauropod.
Sauropods had long necks, long tails, and
stubby pillar like legs with small heads. They weren’t exactly the most
attractive of the dinosaurs but they were certainly some of the largest. The
group includes families like the Brachiosaurus and the Diplodocus meaning they
didn’t have to be the mammoth Argentinosaurus or the next one on our list to be
of this family.
Sauroposeidon
The Sauroposeidon, named after the Greek God
of the sea, was the largest of the Sauropods. (You’d think considering he was
named after a God and all.) Actually he wasn’t. That title belongs to the now
as yet unnamed find from Patagonia. To be honest, even before that
Sauroposeidon wasn’t the biggest, that title belonged to our friend in the
paragraph above. But in the late 90s and early 2000s that was a topic of
frequent debate.
Like most dinosaurs it seems the first
evidence of Sauroposeidon was discovered in a North American rural area in the
state of Oklahoma. In 1994, Dr. Richard Cifelli and a team from the Oklahoma
Natural History Museum were digging in a claystone outcrop. At first it was
thought to be the petrified trunks of trees (go figure) as there was no way any
animal remains could be that large.
It wouldn’t be until 1999-2000 that a study
would finally be published on this big guy leading to a media firestorm of
stupidity and flagrant misprinting of erroneous information. (Yay for freedom
of the press!) This led to claims of this monster weighing everywhere from 30
tons to 600 tons! (Swear to God it’s true…)
The final weight the scientific community has
agreed upon is between 50 to 60 tons. Still, that’s pretty huge. Like
Argentinosaurus he has a long neck. You may be wondering how these guys hold
their necks up to get to the canopy of trees in order to eat. It’s quite
ingenious really. It seems their vertebrae are comprised of tiny air sacs, much
like the structure of a bird’s bone, making their necks significantly lighter
and therefore capable of performing this feat.
While the media was wrong about him being the
biggest, there is one title they could bestow upon him. Sauroposeidon was by
and far the tallest of the Sauropods. But what about the most vicious? For that
we head over to Utah.
Utahraptor
I have no idea if the Utahraptor is as
colorful or as feathery as the artist’s representation above but there is one
thing me and the rest of the paleontological community can agree on. The brutal
claws that adorn both of this predacious fellows feet are very, very real.
In 2001 a study was conducted on two feet
belonging to the Utahraptor searching for stress fractures. You would think
that in a creature that leaps and digs into the flesh of much larger and
tougher creatures would suffer a few breaks and bruises occasionally. The weird
thing they discovered was the lack of any at all. This raptors bones were
extremely durable, that much is inarguable.
This is where the timeline gets a little
funny. The original findings of the Utahraptor were in 1975 but they garnered
very little interest. It wasn’t until 1991 during the excavation of what would
come to be known as the armored dinosaur Gastonia, that everyone’s curiosity
had been peaked, when the taloned foot was recovered.
Amazingly
the movie “Jurassic Park” would come out two years later in 1993 and feature a
close relative of the Utahraptor, but it certainly didn’t get the dimensions
correct. The Velciraptor featured in the film would actually have been more of
a chicken size whereas the Utahraptor was closer to the man-eating pack hunters
from the film.
Right around 23 feet long and anywhere from
1,110 to 1,500 pounds these avian-like killing machines would have no problem
terrorizing an amusement park of paleontologists and mathematicians. For a representation
of scale just take a look at the graph below.
Spinosaurus
The Spinosaurus, meaning Spine Lizard not
surprisingly is an interesting addition to the Cretaceous period indeed. As of
right now it may be the largest carnivore discovered. Weighing anywhere from 7
to 20 tons, a height somewhere in the range of 50 feet, and the teeth of a
crocodile, this would be a foreboding creature to encounter in the wild.
Discovered in Egypt in 1912, The Spinosaurus
has had it rough even after extinction. After being identified in 1915 and
enjoyed by scientists for a couple of decades, in World War II the original
remains were destroyed. (Stupid Nazis…)
The spines on its back weren’t used to deter
predators (obviously, he was the biggest guy in the bar) but their function
continues to elude paleontologists worldwide. The two theories that sound best
to me is they were used for mating displays and for thermoregulation.
Thermoregulation is an organisms ability to
regulate its body temperature even in extreme environments. This would have
been extremely useful for Spinosaurs because they were both aquatic and land
animals. The addition would have given their massive bodies the ability to
gradually adapt to the shift in external temperatures when transferring from one environment to the other.
Sarcosuchus
That guy is Sarcosuchus, and he may be the
biggest of the crocodile family to have ever walked the Earth. If anything you
should thank your lucky stars all that stayed behind were his two little
brothers of the families (Alligators and modern Crocodiles) because if this
star of a bad SyFy movie were still around, pants wetting related incidents
would be up ten trillion percent.
Like everyone else on this list he was around
during the Cretaceous period as well. His remains were first discovered in 1946
in fragments in the Sahara Desert and a complete skull was recovered by the
French along the Niger river in 1964, but it wasn’t until 2000 the Sarcosuchus’
anatomy was well understood.
With a five foot head, a 38 foot body, and an
eight ton body frame, the only thing to evolve on these merciless aquatic
murderers was their size. And thankfully, it went down…significantly.
The
Mysterious World Below
Discoveries like the recent one in Argentina
tell us one thing. Even as we aim our eye toward the farthest reaches of space everything
just beneath our feet has some nooks to yet be explored. In the coming months
the new monstrosity found in Patagonia will be named according to the region it
was found, its classifications, and the people who discovered it.
This is a story I’ll be following (and
anything else dinosaur related) in the coming months so expect to see more in
the future. I hope you enjoyed this article and as always please share this on
Facebook and other social media sites! Thank you!
-Ryan Sanders
To learn more about
any of the material discussed in the article above feel free to follow any of
the links below. Hope you enjoyed reading this! Thanks and Happy Learning!
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