Heavy dinosaur fossils break the road during transport
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A massive long-necked dinosaur that measured about 100 feet (90 meters) long when it lived about 90 million years ago has been discovered by Argentinian paleontologists. Its fossils were so heavy they broke the road when being transported.
This is according to a report by Live Science published on Sunday.
The specimen is called the titanosaur and its bones caused a traffic accident when the researchers were transporting them to Buenos Aires to be studied.
"The weight destabilized the vehicle and caused an accident," study senior author Fernando Novas, a paleontologist at the Bernardino Rivadavia Natural Sciences Museum in Buenos Aires and a researcher with the Argentine National Research Council (CONICET), told Live Science in a translated email.
"Luckily, no one was seriously injured and the bones of this dinosaur, which flew through the air, were so hard that they were not damaged. On the contrary, they broke the asphalt of the road."
So, the researchers gave the herbivore a scientific name representative of its massive size: Chucarosaurus diripienda. In the region's indigenous language Quechua, "Chucaro" means "hard and indomitable animal.”
The researcher noted that C. diripienda was extremely long, using its length to its advantage. "Its long neck allowed it to feed on the leaves at the top of the trees, and its long tail would have been an effective weapon against attacks by the large carnivorous dinosaurs that lurked in its environment," Novas said.
First discovered in 2018
Its remains are not entirely new. They were first discovered in 2018 and were so heavy they had to be moved inch by inch.
While alive and roaming the Earth in the mid-Cretaceous, C. diripienda would have weighed between 30 and 40 tons (27 and 36 metric tons), Novas added. "However, it is far from being one of the largest and most colossal dinosaurs, such as Patagotitan, Argentinosaurus or Notocolossus, which would have weighed between 70 tons (63.5 metric tons)," he further told Live Science.
Now that the scientists have managed to move the dinosaur, they will proceed to study it further, searching for the many mysteries its fossils hide.
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