The Largest Creature EVER

We can all agree that 2020 and the starting months of 2021 have been crazy, filled with headlines that come to us at no shock because of what we’ve had to endure these last couple of years. But, experts finding fossils to the largest animal to roam the planet Earth were probably not on our prediction lists. On Tuesday, January 19th, 2021, the remains of a gigantic dinosaur were found in Argentina.

Paleontologists found these remains in the Neuquén Province in northwest Patagonia and believe that this creature, named the Titanosaur, was ninety-eight million years old. Titanosaurs are known to be a diverse group of sauropod dinosaurs, commonly recognizable for not only their large size but their long necks, tails, and four-legged stance. Its twenty-four vertebrae tail and pieces of its pelvic and pectoral girdle helped paleontologists name it a Titanosaur. It had been buried in sedimentary deposits, commonly known nowadays as the Candeleros Formation.

Now, call me crazy, but I’ve always had trouble believing that dinosaurs were real, especially after my mother had to break it to me that Barney was just a man in a costume. I always thought that there was no way that a Tyrannosaurus rex was roaming around, minding its own business, hundreds of millions of years ago, even with all of the scientific “evidence.” But now, with this discovery, and to know that he might’ve had an older cousin was jaw-dropping. Published in the journal Cretaceous Research, paleontologists believe that it was the “largest sauropods ever found,” beating out the Patagotitan. The species of Patagotitans lived around one-hundred million to ninety-five million years ago and were an outstanding one-hundred and twenty-two feet long. This isn’t the first time paleontologists have found Titanosaur fossils, though. These fossils have been found on all continents except Antarctica and have been sought to weigh over forty tons.

Something to think about before you lie down to go to bed tonight, or while you stand in the shower and can question everything you thought you knew, is what our planet was like hundreds of millions of years ago and how we’re still discovering things in modern time. Researchers are working endlessly to find new species and evidence of pre-existing ones too, and how their work continues to discover the rest of the remains of this dinosaur. This research was conducted by Argentina’s The Zapala Museum and the universities of Rio Negro Zaragoza.