Gigantic Dinosaur From Argentina Named 'Fearing Nothing'-mashable

This undated artist rendering provided by the Carnegie Museum of Natural History shows the Dreadnoughtus.

Image: Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Mark A. Klingler/Associated Press

Researchers studying the remains of an enormous dinosaur — a creature that was bigger than seven bull elephants — have given it an equally colossal name: Dreadnoughtus, or "fearing nothing."
Scientists hope its unusually well-preserved bones will help reveal secrets about some of the largest animals ever to walk the Earth.

The four-legged beast, with a long neck and powerful 29-foot tail, stretched about 85 feet long and weighed about 65 tons.

The four-legged beast, with a long neck and powerful 29-foot tail, stretched about 85 feet long and weighed about 65 tons. That's more than seven times the weight of even a plus-size male African elephant. Kenneth Lacovara of Drexel University in Philadelphia, who found the specimen in Argentina's southern Patagonia in 2005, said he can't claim it was the most massive dinosaur known, because the remains of comparably sized beasts are too fragmentary to allow a direct comparison.
But it's the heaviest land animal whose weight during life can be calculated directly with a standard technique that analyzes bones of the upper limbs, he said. And its bones indicate it was still growing when it died. A flood swept away Dreadnoughts some 80 million years ago, spitting out its remains on quicksand-like sediment, which then absorbed the dinosaur.
Lacovara and colleagues describe the plant-eating behemoth in a study released Thursday by the journal Scientific Reports. He said the bones were probably around 75 million to 77 million years old.

Source :The Associated Press