It’s official: an Argentine dinosaur as heavy as a Boeing 737 is the biggest ever discovered.
The behemoth weighed more than 65 tons and perhaps as many as 77, a new study says. That makes the animal not just the biggest known dinosaur but also the biggest known land animal ever. Only a few whale species are heftier — and this dinosaur’s bones show it was still growing.
Scientists have christened the gigantic vegetarian Patagotitan mayorum, in honor of the Argentine region of Patagonia and the Mayo family, owners of the Patagonian farm where a worker stumbled on the fossil in 2010. The titan of Patagonia is described in scientific detail for the first time in this week’s Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. The study also sheds new light on how and when dinosaurs went from big to truly gargantuan.
Patagotitan, which was some 120 feet long, has some competition as the world’s biggest dinosaur. Tantalizing scraps of bone hint at species that are more massive still.
“I don’t think the record we have now will hold forever,” says study co-author Diego Pol of Argentina’s Egidio Feruglio Museum of Paleontology. But “so far, out of the dinosaurs … we can recognize as valid species, we don’t have any (others) as big as Patagotitan.”
