Credit: National Museum of Brazil
RIO DE JANEIRO: South American palaeontologists have unveiled a new titanosaur species that lived 88 million years ago in Argentina. It is one of the largest fossils ever discovered.
"It is one of the three largest dinosaur fossils ever discovered in the world and the most complete because we found 70 per cent of its skeleton," said Jorge Calvo director of the palaeontology centre of Argentina's Comahue National University.
Giant chief
Along with Brazilian co-authors, Calvo details the find in the Annals of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences.
Belonging to the titanosaur group of herbivorous giants, the newly discovered member measured up to 34 meters in length and lived exclusively in the southern region of Patagonia.
It has been named Futalognkosaurus dukei, with the first name from the local Mapuche language meaning "giant chief of dinosaurs," and the second in honour of the Duke Energy Argentina company that largely financed the digs at Lake Barreales, where the huge fossil was unearthed.
The new species was found at the start of an excavation, in February 2000, alongside other animal and plant fossils. The fossils allowed experts to "reconstruct an ecosystem of the upper Cretaceous period [from 97 to 66 million years ago] with unprecedented exactitude," said Calvo.
Crocodiles and pterosaurs
"The fact that most of the fossils were found in a limited area under a 0.5-meter rock layer makes us deduct that all those animals lived in the same epoch," he added.
The palaeontologists also found fossils of fish, shellfish, at least two types of crocodile relatives and several dinosaurs, including a flying pterosaur and carnivores like Megaraptor, with its 40-centimeter talons.
They also found plant fossils of leaves showing the predominance of angiosperms (flowering plants) at the time.
