#drednought

Another Patagonian giant

Dreadnoughts were a class of giant (for the time) battleship of the early 20th century, and exemplified a huge unstoppable mass of floating metal. The name has been re-used for the latest example of Titanosaur, an unstoppable mass of flesh and bone that roamed during the Cretaceous some 75 million years back. The name means fear nothing, and is held to apply to cruiser and dino both. The nearly complete, well preserved specimen was discovered in southern Argentina in 2005, and described in the latest issue of Scientific Reports. It took most of the intervening years to prepare the specimen, removing the host rock a fleck at a time.

They estimate it weighed as much as 12 African elephants (some 65 tons, using analysis of the strength of limb bones), and measured around 25 metres from tip to tail. The bones also indicate that it was still growing when it was engulfed in the quicksand that preserved it for the intervening aeons. The partial skeleton is the most complete Titanosaur discovered, and is expected to reveal much useful information on the life and movement patterns of these little known creatures. One vertebra has a bite mark on it, suggesting that the tip of the animal (and probably its missing head) was sticking above the quicksand for some time before it was fully covered. Several carnivore teeth matching the bite mark were found at the site.

Back in them days, southern South America was a temperate forest, both conifer and deciduous, with meandering rivers ambling through the landscape. These rivers flooded periodically, creating the patches of quicksand that swallowed this titan up...maybe that was the one thing it should have feared.

Loz

Image credit, with right tibia (short leg bone): Kenneth Lacovara

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/sep/04/battleship-beast-colossal-dinosaur-skeleton-found-patagonia-argentina-dreadnoughtus-schrani