Malcolm Ritter at AP via TPM tells us about the gigantic critter discovered in 2005 in Argentina's Patagonia, of which Ritter says, "The four-legged beast, with a long neck and powerful 29-foot tail,
stretched about 85 feet long and weighed about 65 tons. That's more than
seven times the weight of even a plus-size male African elephant."
And yes, it was a plant-eater. Sometimes people chide me for not controlling my weight better, because "after all, [I'm] a vegetarian... it should be easy." Right. Please see "Dreadnoughtus" for an example of a sprout-eater that was not light at all.
(See pic on AP article. It's a great pic of the reconstruction, which is considerably advanced at this point, but I'm not reproducing a photo from AP on the day it was published... that's just asking for trouble.)
Thursday, September 4, 2014
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Reading the BBC article they don't think it was full-grown, but a 'teenager' and would have probably gotten bigger! They are also discussing the possibility that the various giant dinosaur may be the same family at various stages in their life because this is the first one they have discovered that was so complete.
ReplyDeleteBryan, it's a big bugger as it is; a bigger bugger is hard to imagine. At any size, the penalty for added growth is huge: mass increases, of course, with volume, which grows as the cube of the linear dimensions, and restructuring sculpted by evolution has effective limits, especially at the larger sizes. Then again, maybe they've thought of something I've overlooked; I suppose for now I'll defer to the experts.
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