The largest animal ever to walk the Earth gets a name
The biggest dinosaur ever to walk the Earth finally has a name.
It's called Patagotitan mayorum, according to a study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
The titanosaur weighed 76 tons and stretched 122 feet long. To put that in perspective, National Geographic described the dinosaur as weighing the same as 12 African elephants.
It lived around 102 million years ago and was first discovered in Argentina in 2012. Its ribs, vertebrae, leg and arm bones, and part of its hip were unearthed a few years later. The beast would have lived in modern-day Argentina during the Cretaceous period.
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The new study looked at the giant titanosaur's anatomy and how it evolved with such a lumbering body mass.
It concluded that Patagotitan hit the upper limit of how large a land animal can get, so don't expect to see it dwarfed by another dinosaur anytime soon.
Topics Animals
Sasha is a news writer at Mashable's San Francisco office. She's an SF native who went to UC Davis and later received her master's from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She's been reporting out of her hometown over the years at Bay City News (news wire), SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle website), and even made it out of California to write for the Chicago Tribune. She's been described as a bookworm and a gym rat.
