This week's number one paleontology story was the discovery of Dreadnoughtus schrani, an astonishingly complete fossil Titanosaur. The importance of the Dreadnoughtus fossil lies in the fact that it is seventy percent complete. Most fossil finds are fragmentary, and Titanosaur remains recently found in Argentina hint at animals up to 130 feet in length. The Titanosaurs were the last of the long-necked Sauropod dinosaurs, and most remains come from Gondwana, specifically South America.
Here's a short, somewhat dry (I prefer these to the "Fieri'd" up "extreme" sort) video about the differences between Titanosaurs and other Sauropod lineages, concentrating on the genus Saltasaurus:
Me being me, and thus snarky, here's a little long-distance dedication to Dreadnoughtus:
Yeah, of course I know that dinosaurs aren't lizards, but reading over the estimated weights for Dreadnoughtus, the line "and you should see the way it shits" popped immediately into my snarky, snarky mind.
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5 comments:
I just love its name!!!
You mean they aren't thunder lizards?
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In 1909, John (Jackie) Fisher became the 1st Baron Fisher, and the motto he placed on his coat of arms was "Fear God and Dread Nought" as a salute to his involvement with the development of the all-big-gun steam powered battleship.
A somewhat ironic parallel to the dinosaurs is that the dreadnoughts were the nuclear weapons of their time. Nations poured immense treasure into building them, and they only faced off in one actual battle, the wholly inconclusive Battle of Jutland.
What many naval officers failed to understand is that by the outbreak of hostilities in the Second World War, their fleets were built around dinosaurs that couldn't survive the evolution of air power...
You can get away with anything if you tack a Dead Milkmen song to it.
they only faced off in one actual battle, the wholly inconclusive Battle of Jutland.
There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today.
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