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Giant Dinosaur Unearthed In Argentina
sciencehabit writes Researchers working in Argentina have discovered the most complete skeleton of a titanosaur, a group of gigantic plant-eating dinosaurs that dominated the Southern Hemisphere beginning about 90 million years ago. The new dino, named Dreadnoughtus schrani, was 26 meters long and weighed about 59 metric tons—that is, twice as long as Tyrannosaurus rex and as heavy as a herd of elephants. That puts it on a par with other well-known giants such as Argentinosaurus (but it's four times as large as the perhaps better known Diplodocus). The researchers say that the beast was so big it would have had no fear of predators. And it was about to get bigger: A close examination of the fossils, especially its back and shoulder bones, indicates that the animal was still growing when it died.
But if it is so big, instead of tiny insectoid parasites, a pack of rats might just burrow into its hide and make a nest, instead of fleas it might have ferrets like creatures crawling over it and biting it to drink its blood. And I do not even want to think about what it might have instead of the standard tapeworms. It would be interesting to research what type of ecosystems build up around such giant creatures.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Sure. That's why you always see lions and hyenas taking down elephants and hippos.
A creature weighing 59 short tons of course would be wimpy and easily bullied and not at all impressive.
Unless the original headline is accurate, in which case get Michael Bay on the phone.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
It's not uncommon in many reptiles to just never stop growing. I wonder if some of these dinosaurs are
just exceptionally large specimens of already know dinosaurs instead of entirely new species.
the original article has a human next to the fossil for scaling. and it's open access apparently http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep... (the link is in the sciencemag.org "story").
new sig
Thx. The dino is in mid-stride, the figure is just standing in its path, waving. Yup, that's a human alright!
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Pack behaviour - that was my thought as well. I have seen video of a pack of lions exacting revenge on an elephant. The elephant got so exhausted with all those lions on it that it fell over and the writing was on the wall after that. What a slow, horrible way to go. An article recently suggested that T-Rexes may have hunted in packs which makes it plausible that an animal like the Dreadnoughtus could actually be taken down.
Also worth considering what vulnerabilities being that large could pose, such as getting stuck in a ravine or falling victim to some other terrain hazard making it easy for predators to wait for it to weaken before striking.
Nice video with the researcher here
Is that a standard unit of measure now? What are the conversion factors?
include some scale - you know, a standard metric - a Volkswagen Beetle, football field, Rhode Island?
It's about 10,000 kilos heavier than an (empty) 737 and about 10 metres longer.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Almost everybody has an HD photo-camera nowadays. Why not make some images from the excavation site and publish them together with the text about the discovery?
Drawings are OK, but nothing can substitute an HD JPG image.
"A better example of pack hunters taking down a larger animal would be wolves taking down a moose or ox."
Sure but the point he was making I think is that those aren't good examples of animals being quite big enough to survive pack hunters. I think the point is that there are at least some animals that have grown so big that nothing really bothers them much, even in packs- sometimes their smaller young get hunted but that's about it.
Blue whales are a fine example like elephants, sure orcas have been known to go after the young, but adults? Not a chance - there's just too much animal there for even a pack of them to deal with.
I think the summary was pointing out simply that the colossal size of this animal meant it was in that category- the set of animals that have managed to grow big enough in their environment that when fully grown even packs aren't going to dick around with.
I suspect a pack probably could take down these animals, just as a pack of hyenas probably could take down an elephant and a pack of orcas probably could take down a blue whale, but when the risk is so high no such packs are ever going to bother in practice. Why shouldn't this animal fall into the same category? It doesn't seem unreasonable to think that it's sheer size meant it was never hunted when fully grown or near fully grown whether by packs or solo hunters, it was just too fucking big to bother with.
I guess that's a form of specialisation though? Effectively what you're seeing there is evolution in action- the only Lions that could survive the drought were those that adapted to hunt elephants and that continued afterwards, but whether it's a viable long term strategy is a different question, if you whipe out all your prey in your area then suddenly those elephant hunting lions will be back to square one, such that those who adapted simply to hunt elephants will die due to lack of elephants forcing them back towards the norm. Potentially what may happen is the pride heads off after other herds of elephants that are more capable of fighting off lions and they are dissuaded from further hunting of Elephants (or simply wiped out in a failed hunt) that way too. Of course, the other possibility is that they continue to successfully hunt elephants and it's no longer true that elephants have no persistent sustained natural predators- lions become exactly that, well, until the elephants grow even larger through evolutionary pressure perhaps.
Evolution will always throw up such situations now and again, and I suspect the same was true of this creature, and I suspect the same is true of adult blue whales - I didn't mean so much by saying they don't have any natural predators doesn't necessarily imply they're never ever hunted, simply that it only happens in extreme fringe circumstances that may only be temporary blips in the history of evolution where evolution tries and fails these things tended back to how things were before. Fundamentally such freak events are somewhat unnatural (okay, well, pedantically, everything that happens ever is technically natural, but you get the point) until they become naturalised as normal events.
I think it's more a question when talking about natural predators if it's something that is constant and sustained such that the predator/prey populations stay in balance. If the prey is hunted to extinction then it loses it's natural predators through extinction, it becomes a historical footnote with that natural predator. If they can continue in balance being hunted then that is their natural predator in the cycle of life. We've had fringe cases of pelicans eating pidgeons before, but such fringe cases I do not think are enough to class them as natural predators of pidgeons unless it similarly becomes sustained and commonplace.
So such an event doesn't mean that animals can have no natural predators consistently through time, not at all, evolution isn't binary, it works on a spectrum- there will be periods whereby they are still evolving to be big enough to be free from predators, and there will be periods where the predators caught up, but it's quite possible that this particular specimen (arguably similar to blue whales) reached a size where they were safe and continued to live at that size such that would-be future predators were whiped out by extinction events (the event that killed the dinosaurs, or event now where humans are hunting species to extinction) in a way that that particular branch of life was ended abruptly at a point where no such predators managed to exist for the species in questions.
Though next week, we might find fossils of 29 metre long t-rex cousins too of course :)
Nah, it would have been discounted as misinformation - placed there by God to test the faith that the Earth is only 6,000 years old.