'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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So Long, Sue! Famed T. Rex Makes Way for Bigger Beast

By Laura Geggel, Senior Writer | August 31, 2017 11:52am ET

After spending nearly 18 years in the Field Museum's great hall in Chicago, Sue — the largest and most complete Tyrannosaurus rex ever discovered — will move to an exhibit upstairs, making room for the world's largest known dinosaur: a titanosaur.

Once upstairs, Sue will be reconnected with its gastralia, a unit of rib-like bones that stretch across the belly. The dinosaur will also have adjustments made to its furcular (wishbone), arms and legs, said Bill Simpson, the collections manager of fossil vertebrates at the Field Museum.

"The gastralia [addition] is the biggest thing, but we're also making a few other corrections to Sue," Simpson told Live Science. 

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Newly discovered titanosaur species had super senses

APRIL 27, 2016

by Chuck Bednar

A new species of titanosaurian dinosaur that ranged in weight from the size of a cow to that of a sperm whale has been discovered by researchers working in Argentina, according to a new study published Tuesday in the online edition of the open-access journal PLOS One.

The new species was identified based on a complete skull and partial neck fossil discovered by by Rubén Martínez from the Laboratorio de Paleovertebrados of the Universidad Nacional de la Patagonia San Juan Bosco (UNPSJB) and his colleagues at a site in central Patagonia.

Identified as Sarmientosaurus musacchioi, the creature was a titanosaurian sauropod that lived during the Upper Cretaceous period, between 100.5 and 66 million years ago, the study authors wrote in their newly-published paper. Like all titanosaurs, it was a plant-eater with a long neck and tail, and its remains were found at the Bajo Barreal Formation in Chubut Province.

Discovery sheds new light on anatomical diversity of sauropods

The fossils were said to be well-preserved and anatomically primitive, and in a statement, the researchers said that they were analyzed using computerized tomography (CT) imaging scans. They discovered that Sarmientosaurus had a tiny brain relative to its rather large body, but also found evidence that it had greater sensory capabilities than most other sauropods.

Based on their CT scans and other analyses, Martínez and his co-authors concluded that this species had large eyeballs and could see quite well, and that the mechanics of its inner ear may have been designed for detecting sounds at lower frequencies than other types of titanosaurs.

Furthermore, the inner ear’s balance organ indicates that the Sarmientosaurus tended to keep its head facing downward, with the snout pointed towards the ground so that it could feed on plants growing close to the surface. The snout, along with the creature’s pneumatized cervical vertebrae and ossified cervical tendon, are rare features in this type of dinosaur and serve to broaden “our understanding of the anatomical diversity of this remarkable sauropod clade,” they wrote.

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