STL Science Center

STL Science Center

19 October 2012

Long Overdue Creature Feature

©Nobu Tamura
Amazingly, and I searched the history of all of the entries ever done for this blog, I have never covered, individually for an entire week, Argentinosaurus as anything other than a prey item. Argentinosaurus huinculensis is named for the country and the rock formation in which it was initially found. The type skeleton consists of bits and pieces of skeleton, but enough remains were found to estimate its size given known sauropods and their length and girth ratios to the same times of bones that were found. The largest bone recovered is a partial femur, though this is not a bone that is 100% known to belong to the animal, it contains enough characters that the study around it, conducted by Bonaparte and Coria, assigned it to Argentinosaurus and helped to estimate the size of the animal. Bonaparte and Coria published their findings in 1993 and, at the time, Argentinosaurus was one of the largest titanosaurids known. Amphicoelias and, the supposed, Bruhathkayosaurus are larger, but Argentinosaurus is still one of the largest sauropods ever known; Amphicoelias is a diplodocid and Bruhathkayosaurus is tentatively still assigned to the titanosaurids.

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