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Gargantuan new dinosaur uncovered

It weighed as much as eight school buses. Its neck looked like a section of oil pipeline. Its thigh bone alone was as big as a grown man. Say hello to Dreadnoughtus schrani, announced by Drexel University scientists on Thursday.

Illustration: Jennifer Hall Rendering of the massive Dreadnoughtus schrani in life. Dreadnoughtus had a 37-foot-long neck, 30-foot tail, and weighed an estimated 65 tons, making it the most massive land animal whose size can be confidently calculated. In life, Dreadnoughtus was an herbivore that likely spent much of its life eating massive quantities of plants to maintain its enormous body size.
Illustration: Jennifer Hall Rendering of the massive Dreadnoughtus schrani in life. Dreadnoughtus had a 37-foot-long neck, 30-foot tail, and weighed an estimated 65 tons, making it the most massive land animal whose size can be confidently calculated. In life, Dreadnoughtus was an herbivore that likely spent much of its life eating massive quantities of plants to maintain its enormous body size.Read moreJennifer Hall

It weighed as much as eight school buses.

Its 37-foot neck looked like a section of oil pipeline. Its thigh bone alone was as big as a grown man.

Say hello to Dreadnoughtus schrani.

Drexel University scientists announced Thursday they had unearthed the heaviest known dinosaur for which a weight can be accurately calculated.

Someone call Jenny Craig. It's more than 65 tons.

"Astoundingly huge," said Kenneth Lacovara, an associate professor of paleontology and geology at Drexel.

He and his colleagues, who started digging up the animal's bones in 2005 in Argentina, determined its weight with an accepted scientific formula that relies on the circumferences of a thigh bone and upper arm bone.

One other dinosaur in the academic literature - also found in Argentina, in 1987, dubbed Argentinosaurus - has been estimated at well over 70 tons, but no upper arm bone (humerus) was found for that one. Still another contender in the same range was announced in May, again from Argentina (was there something in the water?), but that one has yet to be formally vetted by the scientific community.

So for now, Dreadnoughtus, described in the journal Scientific Reports, holds a special place.

And it was not done growing, as evidenced by shoulder bones that had yet to fuse together, said one of Lacovara's co-authors, Matthew C. Lamanna, assistant curator of vertebrate paleontology at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

Kingpin or no, scientists are not necessarily concerned with superlatives, but with what such fossils can tell us about how the big animals moved and lived.

This one is likely to reveal a lot, said David C. Evans, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.

Many of the biggest known dinosaurs are represented by just a few bones. This one was unusually well-preserved, with the Drexel-led team able to recover close to half of its 250-odd bones.

"This is a special look into a part of the dinosaur family tree that typically doesn't get preserved," said Evans, who was not involved with the discovery. "This is not the last you'll hear about this dinosaur."

Lacovara named the animal after the dreadnought class of battleships from the early 20th century, so nicknamed because they feared nothing - dreaded naught. This dinosaur was so big that few predators would have dared to attack it, Lacovara said. But if one of them did, the dinosaur could have responded with a smack of its muscular, 29-foot tail.

"It essentially had a weaponized tail," Lacovara said.

The "schrani" portion of the name is a tribute to Philadelphia tech entrepreneur Adam Schran, who helped fund the research.

Lacovara imagines that the big dino sustained itself by parking its large body in the forest for hours at a time, gorging on tens of thousands of calories' worth of leaves and plant matter.

tavril@phillynews.com

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