A Couple Papers

Thankfully Argentinosaurus is an animal that we can, with total confidence, say the paper naming and describing it is available for us all to read online. There is one hitch though; the paper was published in Ameghiniana, the Argentinian Paleontological Society's national publication, meaning it is completely start to finish in Spanish. Some of us in the world cannot, therefore, read any of the article. I am sure, though, based on past papers of both Bonaparte and Coria that I have been able to read, that this paper is a detailed study of the vertebrae and leg bones initially used to describe Argentinosaurus. One paper that we can read, which is not entirely about Argentinosaurus, is by Mazzeta, Christiansen, and Farina. Mazzeta and Farina were based in Uruguay and Christiansen, as usual, is based in Denmark. The purpose that brought these three together was studying the sheer sizes of Patagonian dinosaurs. As stated before Patagonian dinosaurs are some of the largest we know of, both herbivore and carnivore, and as such it is fairly interesting to study what made for a super-sized roster of species in this one specific area of the world. An exhaustive study was conducted for this paper that used estimation of body weight and length to fill in gaps on skeletons missing large quantities of skeletal material. The end result is well thought out and multiple estimates of the body size and weight of Argentinosaurus, as well as Giganotosaurus, Amargasaurus and a number of others, that relates a lot of important information about exactly how big this dinosaur truly was and how large its major threats, Giganotosaurus for instance, were in relation.