'Thunderclap at Dawn' Dino's Totally Metal Name Honors Colossal Size

By Laura Geggel, Senior Writer | September 27, 2018 11:50am ET

If any rock bands are looking for a cool name, they might draw inspiration from a newly identified long-necked Jurassic giant whose moniker means "a giant thunderclap at dawn."

This colossal dinosaur was the largest beast alive during the Early Jurassic. And it walked in a peculiar way, a new study finds.

Unlike the later long-necked dinosaurs and even today's elephants, the "giant thunderclap" dinosaur didn't walk on straight limbs. Rather, the 13-ton (12 metric tons) dinosaur moved with "a more crouched posture," study senior researcher Jonah Choiniere, a reader in dinosaur paleontology at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, told Live Science. [Titanosaur Photos: Meet the Largest Dinosaur on Record]

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