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Recently we have this new species of titanosaur from Egypt which helps fill in some HUGE gaps.
Egypt is of course famous for much mythology and lore surrounding the raising of obelisks and pyramid keystones or capstones. Now we can add to that list, the "holy grail" or "keystone" of titanosaur evolution - Mansourasaurus shahinae.
Mansourasaurus shahinae is not all that large by titanosaur standards (the published skeletals shows it at about 8.5m, but I suspect that the neck was a good bit longer than they illustrated, as well as having more than the mere 13 vertebrae drawn here, so more like a total length of 10.5 or 11m at least), but enough of it was recovered to give us valuable info about one of the most obscure and murky parts of sauropod evolution - the not-too-taxonomically-stable family of titanosaurs called Argyrosauridae. So far this family includes Argyrosaurus, Paralititan, Quetecsaurus, and probably Lirainosaurus and the "Cooper" titanosaur from Australia. None of these animals are known from complete skeletons, and most are not even known from a well-rounded sampling of both limb and backbone elements. However, now we can see an argyrosaur with both.
www.nature.com/articles/s41559…
media.springernature.com/lw582…
You can see here that the shoulder resembles Dreadnoughtus, which in some ways is the most "argyrosaur-like" of the longkosaurs. It also has a rough proportional resemblance to that of Muyelensaurus, which may be either an argyrosaur or a trigonosaur. The biggest cervical vertebra they found has the same compacted proportions and oddly shaped "Phrygian" neural spine as the one known from Quetecsaurus, and the humerus is extremely wide and flat, with the lower condyles spaced far apart - the classic "surfboard" shape found in both Argyrosaurus and Paralititan, and to a lesser extent in Quetecsaurus. There is also a partial lower jaw including the chin. The curve of the jaw shows this animal had the standard rounded mouth of a high-browser, hinting that its neck was probably longer than in the paper's skeletal. It also shows that argyrosaurs did not have the square mouth of antarctosaurs, which is a critical difference in feeding niches as the two families are closely related.
This article, unfortunately, is behind a paywall. Nature Ecology & Evolution is a journal owned by Springer, which is charging an insane $99 for access to just this one paper. I'm not encouraging anyone to pirate, but I won't shed any tears over Springer's loss if someone does. Springer's current fee-gouging model certainly is encouraging them!
If the authors want to help the free flow of scientific data and also give this dinosaur the benefit of comparative research with other titanosaur experts (and I'm fairly sure they do), they should consider submitting future papers to open-access journals - it's too late for this paper as Springer already holds the copyright now. Instead, it's best to submit to PeerJ, Facets, PloS One, APP, Paleo-Electronica, any of them. They all respect author's copyright and do not charge the authors for digital copies. Springer, along with other corporate conglomerate journal owners like Elsevier, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, Bentham, etc., has never been a good choice, as it is restricting the free flow of taxpayer-funded research despite having no involvement with the grants process or the organization of the dig, gouging both professor and student alike, and not paying the authors a penny for the (unethical) privilege. And they're mostly bean-counters, not scientists. Until they start paying royalties to the authors of papers, this is a rotten deal all the way round. Dump Springer, move to Facets.
Egypt is of course famous for much mythology and lore surrounding the raising of obelisks and pyramid keystones or capstones. Now we can add to that list, the "holy grail" or "keystone" of titanosaur evolution - Mansourasaurus shahinae.
Mansourasaurus shahinae is not all that large by titanosaur standards (the published skeletals shows it at about 8.5m, but I suspect that the neck was a good bit longer than they illustrated, as well as having more than the mere 13 vertebrae drawn here, so more like a total length of 10.5 or 11m at least), but enough of it was recovered to give us valuable info about one of the most obscure and murky parts of sauropod evolution - the not-too-taxonomically-stable family of titanosaurs called Argyrosauridae. So far this family includes Argyrosaurus, Paralititan, Quetecsaurus, and probably Lirainosaurus and the "Cooper" titanosaur from Australia. None of these animals are known from complete skeletons, and most are not even known from a well-rounded sampling of both limb and backbone elements. However, now we can see an argyrosaur with both.
www.nature.com/articles/s41559…
media.springernature.com/lw582…
You can see here that the shoulder resembles Dreadnoughtus, which in some ways is the most "argyrosaur-like" of the longkosaurs. It also has a rough proportional resemblance to that of Muyelensaurus, which may be either an argyrosaur or a trigonosaur. The biggest cervical vertebra they found has the same compacted proportions and oddly shaped "Phrygian" neural spine as the one known from Quetecsaurus, and the humerus is extremely wide and flat, with the lower condyles spaced far apart - the classic "surfboard" shape found in both Argyrosaurus and Paralititan, and to a lesser extent in Quetecsaurus. There is also a partial lower jaw including the chin. The curve of the jaw shows this animal had the standard rounded mouth of a high-browser, hinting that its neck was probably longer than in the paper's skeletal. It also shows that argyrosaurs did not have the square mouth of antarctosaurs, which is a critical difference in feeding niches as the two families are closely related.
This article, unfortunately, is behind a paywall. Nature Ecology & Evolution is a journal owned by Springer, which is charging an insane $99 for access to just this one paper. I'm not encouraging anyone to pirate, but I won't shed any tears over Springer's loss if someone does. Springer's current fee-gouging model certainly is encouraging them!
If the authors want to help the free flow of scientific data and also give this dinosaur the benefit of comparative research with other titanosaur experts (and I'm fairly sure they do), they should consider submitting future papers to open-access journals - it's too late for this paper as Springer already holds the copyright now. Instead, it's best to submit to PeerJ, Facets, PloS One, APP, Paleo-Electronica, any of them. They all respect author's copyright and do not charge the authors for digital copies. Springer, along with other corporate conglomerate journal owners like Elsevier, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, Bentham, etc., has never been a good choice, as it is restricting the free flow of taxpayer-funded research despite having no involvement with the grants process or the organization of the dig, gouging both professor and student alike, and not paying the authors a penny for the (unethical) privilege. And they're mostly bean-counters, not scientists. Until they start paying royalties to the authors of papers, this is a rotten deal all the way round. Dump Springer, move to Facets.
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Regarding References
1 min read
Just a happy jolly reminder to all who come here, please ask before using my work as reference for your work. If I know about it ahead of time, I'm usually okay with it. If you want references, respect the artist. If I see the opposite continuing to happen, I can simply stop posting skeletals here or make them purely pay-to-play (already get contracts so I don't need DA prints revenue, if this whole site died it wouldn't hurt me). Your choice peeps.
Another note; if you need a scale figure, please create your own human silhouette and scale bar. Don't copy mine. It's not that hard.
Another note; if you need a scale figure, please create your own human silhouette and scale bar. Don't copy mine. It's not that hard.
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I'd been meaning to get around to this for a while...
We all know Argentinosaurus is woefully incomplete. But for the first time we can get a mostly solid ides of what it looked like. For a long time, most Argentinosaurus reconstructions had been either purely speculative (i.e. Greg Paul - though he wasn't too far off the mark given the data available in the 1990s) or based on "cloning" the body of a distant relative (Ken Carpenter most notoriously used Saltasaurus, which as a low-grazing dwarf species, is among the worst models for restoring any fragmentary titanosaur over 20m).
More recently some speculative skeletals have cloned Malawisaurus and scaled it up. While a better animal to use for Argentinosaurus gap-filler than Saltasaurus ever was, seeing as it's so much closer to the basal position of Argentinosaurus, Malawisaurus still has the problem of being a relatively small titanosaur with only a moderately long neck by sauropod standards - basically titanosauria's answer to Camarasaurus. Additionally, the extremely short-faced skull of Malawisaurus - whose cheekbones and surangulars appear to make up nearly half its length - appears to be a unique feature of this species. The oddly serpentine look of its rear jaws has no parallel in other titanosaurs, most of which have the jaw joint far forward of the braincase, giving the impression of a Habsburg jaw.
Fortunately, the recent discovery of Patagotitan, and the less recent one of Rukwatitan (which few have taken notice of, despite it probably being Argentinosaurus' closest known relative) have cleared up a lot of confusion. But until now nobody had actually used them to reconstruct the missing parts of Argentinosaurus... yes, until now.
While doing just that with the Mk-II skeletal, I realized one shocking thing. When people like Mazzetta and Carpenter had reduced the estimates for Argentinosaurus size below 30m, they had gotten it dead wrong. Totally off the mark, in fact. It turned out even my own estimate of 33m was low. If Argentinosaurus had neck proportions anything like Rukwatitan (which contains both lower cervicals and a partial pelvis, which can be cross-scaled with that of Argentinosaurus and is nearly identical in shape), this means Argentinosaurus had a bigger neck than any previous silhouette had ever shown - a neck approaching euhelopodid proportions. If you scale the Patagotitan cervical to fit into the series, and scale up Malawisaurus only for the gaps that are left, you end up with one of the longest necks for any sauropod - and that's assuming it had only 14 cervicals, which is only average for a titanosaur. Some derived titanosaurs like Rapetosaurus had as many as 17 cervicals, while some basal ones (which are not known from complete necks) may have maintained the Euhelopodid tradition of having 17 or even 18 of them. Even if it had just 14 of them, Argentinosaurus would have had a roughly 16m (53 ft.) long neck! Proportionally the euhelopodids and mamenchisaurs still have more extreme necks, but in terms of raw length, Argentinosaurus is right up there. Not only that, but if its tail proportions were anything like Rukwatitan (again, relative to the hips), it would have exceeded 40m long. As it stands, because of the small centra in the rear sacrum of Argentinosaurus, I scaled down the caudals to about 85% of what they would have been with exact Rukwatitan proportions (using Rukwatitan caudals as the basis for the tail and Malawisaurus caudals to fill whatever gaps were left). The skeletal still comes out at 37m.
This tells us a few things.
First, Argentinosaurus turns out to be considerably bigger than I previously restored it. 4m longer and at least 10 tons heavier.
Second, with the largest of the Alamosaurus specimens being around 30-33m long based on Scott Hartman's restoration (which I don't disagree with too much), Argentinosaurus is considerably longer. Though it probably was not heavier, due to the likely shape of its rib cage based on the likely narrower dorsals, the difference is still well within the margin of error with such incomplete giants.
Third, Puertasaurus may not outclass it either, as the only Puertasaurus cervical found is around 1.2m long, whereas the longest cervicals of Argentinosaurus would be around 1.8m long with the new Rukwatitan-like neck proportions.
Fourth, even Patagotitan probably was not as big. Its cervicals indicate similar neck proportions, but overall even the largest Patagotitan specimens don't outclass Argentinosaurus in femur length, dorsal vertebra dimensions, or any other measurement I've been able to find. Thanks for getting our hopes up with that forklift pallet photo, Pablo Puerta.
Fifth, Ruyangosaurus may have rivaled it for neck length (the longest Ruyangosaurus cervicals approach 1.5m) but definitely not for body mass (Lu et al. 2014, which I did not have access to when working on our paper, shows that the dorsal column of Ruyangosaurus is considerably shorter, and even with a wider rib cage, it's hard to imagine this animal topping 60 tons - contrary to my own reconstruction, which will need heavy revision).
Sixth... it appears that Paralititan, Dreadnoughtus, the FMNH argyrosaurs, "Antarctosaurus" giganteus and even Notocolossus don't come close.
Seventh, Rukwatitan indicates that "argentinosaurids" already had crazy-long necks even at smaller sizes, and so likely filled in a different niche than "malawisaurids". While the two groups have roughly similar shapes to their cervical vertebrae, the cervical series in argentinosaurids is considerably larger relative to the hips (and thus the body overall) than in malawisaurids.
Eighth, Rukwatitan also shows that artists should NEVER overlook a related species when restoring an incomplete giant - even if, like Rukwatitan, the relative doesn't get a whole lot of press coverage. This one animal completely changes our perspective on Argentinosaurus, even though it's far from complete itself. Every additional bone is valuable data, and far more useful for a reconstruction than simply cloning and scaling up a more complete and well-known but more distant relative (i.e. Malawisaurus).
Ninth... disturbingly, this means every previous restoration of Argentinosaurus (including my old one) is wrong. My Ruyangosaurus is also wrong. And in fact, just about every giant titanosaur mount (other than the Perot Museum's Alamosaurus) is wrong too.
Tenth, if you're in hardcore TL;DR mode, all of this means that Argentinosaurus is still the king.
We all know Argentinosaurus is woefully incomplete. But for the first time we can get a mostly solid ides of what it looked like. For a long time, most Argentinosaurus reconstructions had been either purely speculative (i.e. Greg Paul - though he wasn't too far off the mark given the data available in the 1990s) or based on "cloning" the body of a distant relative (Ken Carpenter most notoriously used Saltasaurus, which as a low-grazing dwarf species, is among the worst models for restoring any fragmentary titanosaur over 20m).
More recently some speculative skeletals have cloned Malawisaurus and scaled it up. While a better animal to use for Argentinosaurus gap-filler than Saltasaurus ever was, seeing as it's so much closer to the basal position of Argentinosaurus, Malawisaurus still has the problem of being a relatively small titanosaur with only a moderately long neck by sauropod standards - basically titanosauria's answer to Camarasaurus. Additionally, the extremely short-faced skull of Malawisaurus - whose cheekbones and surangulars appear to make up nearly half its length - appears to be a unique feature of this species. The oddly serpentine look of its rear jaws has no parallel in other titanosaurs, most of which have the jaw joint far forward of the braincase, giving the impression of a Habsburg jaw.
Fortunately, the recent discovery of Patagotitan, and the less recent one of Rukwatitan (which few have taken notice of, despite it probably being Argentinosaurus' closest known relative) have cleared up a lot of confusion. But until now nobody had actually used them to reconstruct the missing parts of Argentinosaurus... yes, until now.
While doing just that with the Mk-II skeletal, I realized one shocking thing. When people like Mazzetta and Carpenter had reduced the estimates for Argentinosaurus size below 30m, they had gotten it dead wrong. Totally off the mark, in fact. It turned out even my own estimate of 33m was low. If Argentinosaurus had neck proportions anything like Rukwatitan (which contains both lower cervicals and a partial pelvis, which can be cross-scaled with that of Argentinosaurus and is nearly identical in shape), this means Argentinosaurus had a bigger neck than any previous silhouette had ever shown - a neck approaching euhelopodid proportions. If you scale the Patagotitan cervical to fit into the series, and scale up Malawisaurus only for the gaps that are left, you end up with one of the longest necks for any sauropod - and that's assuming it had only 14 cervicals, which is only average for a titanosaur. Some derived titanosaurs like Rapetosaurus had as many as 17 cervicals, while some basal ones (which are not known from complete necks) may have maintained the Euhelopodid tradition of having 17 or even 18 of them. Even if it had just 14 of them, Argentinosaurus would have had a roughly 16m (53 ft.) long neck! Proportionally the euhelopodids and mamenchisaurs still have more extreme necks, but in terms of raw length, Argentinosaurus is right up there. Not only that, but if its tail proportions were anything like Rukwatitan (again, relative to the hips), it would have exceeded 40m long. As it stands, because of the small centra in the rear sacrum of Argentinosaurus, I scaled down the caudals to about 85% of what they would have been with exact Rukwatitan proportions (using Rukwatitan caudals as the basis for the tail and Malawisaurus caudals to fill whatever gaps were left). The skeletal still comes out at 37m.
This tells us a few things.
First, Argentinosaurus turns out to be considerably bigger than I previously restored it. 4m longer and at least 10 tons heavier.
Second, with the largest of the Alamosaurus specimens being around 30-33m long based on Scott Hartman's restoration (which I don't disagree with too much), Argentinosaurus is considerably longer. Though it probably was not heavier, due to the likely shape of its rib cage based on the likely narrower dorsals, the difference is still well within the margin of error with such incomplete giants.
Third, Puertasaurus may not outclass it either, as the only Puertasaurus cervical found is around 1.2m long, whereas the longest cervicals of Argentinosaurus would be around 1.8m long with the new Rukwatitan-like neck proportions.
Fourth, even Patagotitan probably was not as big. Its cervicals indicate similar neck proportions, but overall even the largest Patagotitan specimens don't outclass Argentinosaurus in femur length, dorsal vertebra dimensions, or any other measurement I've been able to find. Thanks for getting our hopes up with that forklift pallet photo, Pablo Puerta.
Fifth, Ruyangosaurus may have rivaled it for neck length (the longest Ruyangosaurus cervicals approach 1.5m) but definitely not for body mass (Lu et al. 2014, which I did not have access to when working on our paper, shows that the dorsal column of Ruyangosaurus is considerably shorter, and even with a wider rib cage, it's hard to imagine this animal topping 60 tons - contrary to my own reconstruction, which will need heavy revision).
Sixth... it appears that Paralititan, Dreadnoughtus, the FMNH argyrosaurs, "Antarctosaurus" giganteus and even Notocolossus don't come close.
Seventh, Rukwatitan indicates that "argentinosaurids" already had crazy-long necks even at smaller sizes, and so likely filled in a different niche than "malawisaurids". While the two groups have roughly similar shapes to their cervical vertebrae, the cervical series in argentinosaurids is considerably larger relative to the hips (and thus the body overall) than in malawisaurids.
Eighth, Rukwatitan also shows that artists should NEVER overlook a related species when restoring an incomplete giant - even if, like Rukwatitan, the relative doesn't get a whole lot of press coverage. This one animal completely changes our perspective on Argentinosaurus, even though it's far from complete itself. Every additional bone is valuable data, and far more useful for a reconstruction than simply cloning and scaling up a more complete and well-known but more distant relative (i.e. Malawisaurus).
Ninth... disturbingly, this means every previous restoration of Argentinosaurus (including my old one) is wrong. My Ruyangosaurus is also wrong. And in fact, just about every giant titanosaur mount (other than the Perot Museum's Alamosaurus) is wrong too.
Tenth, if you're in hardcore TL;DR mode, all of this means that Argentinosaurus is still the king.
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Today the Chubut Monster, possibly the largest dinosaur known, has been published.
There are apparently six specimens from the same site. The largest of them may have exceeded 120 feet in length, and though the paper proposed a maximum mass of 82 tons, I suspect that when restored with the correct rib curvature and soft tissue levels, this animal may have exceeded 115 tons.
The AMNH mount, which is entirely made of fiberglass replicas, appears to be based on the holotype and a few similar-sized specimens. These are still smaller than the individual represented by the gigantic femur on the forklift pallets, which is a bit more eroded than the smaller femurs at the site.
Patagotitan mayorum is build like something between Argentinosaurus and a lognkosaur, with traces of Malawisaurus-like features as well. Though the cladistic analysis in the paper is odd to say the least (taking Rinconsaurus and most other aeolosaurs out of Saltasauridae and making them sister-group to lognkosauria, and throwing Argentinosaurus into lognkosauria, while throwing Malawisaurus into a derived lithostrotian cluster!) it does make two very interesting points; not only is the new Chubut Monster Patagotitan related to Argentinosaurus, but Ruyangosaurus is classed as a titanosaur more derived than Andesaurus.
It seems ironic that the paper does not draw a closer relation between Patagotitan and Ruyangosaurus, because the morphology of their posterior dorsal vertebrae appears almost identical. The oddly leaf-shaped neural spines, the many shallow and thin laminae, and V-shaped prezygapophyses so recently having lost the hypantrum, are very similar to those of Patagotitan, which still retains a small hypantrum in a few of the mid-dorsals. The slender neural spines of the caudal vertebrae recall Mendozasaurus. The centra of the dorsals resemble Malawisaurus to some extent, and Argentinosaurus from certain angles. It's looking like Patagotitan occupies a node on the titanosaur family tree somewhat more derived than Argentinosaurus, a direct descendant of the fork in the road between the "Malawisaurs" (Malawisaurus and Savannasaurus) and more derived groups such as the true lognkosaurs.
The biggest specimen of Patagotitan is known from a femur that both has the unusual proximal curvature and lateral bulge of that of Ruyangosaurus, and a size exceeding the (reconstructed) length of the Argentinosaurus femur.
One final note: Just because I'm guesstimating that Patagotitan's largest individuals could have outclassed Argentinosaurus, Puertasaurus, etc. in overall mass, don't take that as meaning that "Patagotitan was always larger than any other titanosaur in all aspects". We have six individuals for Patagotitan and only one for Puertasaurus, one or possibly two for Argentinosaurus, all of which are far less complete than Patagotitan. These animals were all proportioned differently, and we know from experience that one can have a longer femur but be less massive overall, or that one species can have a longer body but less volume due to its rib cage shape, etc. One of these animals may be the longest, but a different one could be the tallest, or the heaviest. They are so close it's hard to call, so any attempt to do so (like mine) should take into account their proportions, or at least their likely proportions based on more complete relatives. For example lognkosaurs and lithostrotians appear to be wider than "andesaurs" or "argentinosaurs" for any given body length. More derived titanosaurs tend to outmass more basal ones of similar length, both due to wider rib cages and more robust limbs. And so on.
Argentinosaurus is known from two femurs, one which is an incomplete shaft, estimated at 2.5m when complete, the other being more complete and roughly 2.25m long. The largest Patagotitan femur (pictured above) is about 2.38m long, so smaller than the larger of the two Argentinosaurus femurs would have been when complete. That said, a 2.5m femur is only 12 cm larger than a 2.38m femur - literally just under five inches difference, no more. If Patagotitan had the same proportions as Argentinosaurus, then Argentinosaurus would be bigger - but given that Patagotitan's femur and many other elements look more derived, this was not necessarily the case. Its transverse processes are longer, and likely supported a proportionally wider rib cage, and if that's true then Patagotitan was probably more massive, to where the 5-inch femur length difference was rendered moot. And remember that 2.5m for the Argentinosaurus femur is an estimate for an incomplete midshaft. We don't know for sure if it was that long when complete. I've seen pictures of the second, smaller femur, but none from a good enough angle to guess its proportions, and none of them of good quality. The larger femur may end up being less than 2.5m long when scaled to the smaller one. There is no limb material at all for Puertasaurus, and only a fibula from the largest Alamosaurus, so again comparisons of limb bones are murky at best, and often don't tell you much about how the rest of the body was built.
At the end of the day, who is "the biggest" is a bit subjective, since (a) few people actually build a scale model of the largest specimens using actual measurements, (b) most giant sauropods are known from so few bones, so their proportions are sometimes poorly understood to begin with, and (c) most species are known from one or two specimens, a horrible sample size that gives no hints as to how large the biggest individuals of that species actually did get. So it's more accurate to say "the biggest known Patagotitan was probably bigger than the only known Puertasaurus or the only published Argentinosaurus." Not the "final verdict" people obsessively demand, but then again if paleontology was as well-funded as most other sciences, you might have a lot more specimens and a better idea of the upper limits.
Argentinosaurus is known from two femurs, one which is an incomplete shaft, estimated at 2.5m when complete, the other being more complete and roughly 2.25m long. The largest Patagotitan femur (pictured above) is about 2.38m long, so smaller than the larger of the two Argentinosaurus femurs would have been when complete. That said, a 2.5m femur is only 12 cm larger than a 2.38m femur - literally just under five inches difference, no more. If Patagotitan had the same proportions as Argentinosaurus, then Argentinosaurus would be bigger - but given that Patagotitan's femur and many other elements look more derived, this was not necessarily the case. Its transverse processes are longer, and likely supported a proportionally wider rib cage, and if that's true then Patagotitan was probably more massive, to where the 5-inch femur length difference was rendered moot. And remember that 2.5m for the Argentinosaurus femur is an estimate for an incomplete midshaft. We don't know for sure if it was that long when complete. I've seen pictures of the second, smaller femur, but none from a good enough angle to guess its proportions, and none of them of good quality. The larger femur may end up being less than 2.5m long when scaled to the smaller one. There is no limb material at all for Puertasaurus, and only a fibula from the largest Alamosaurus, so again comparisons of limb bones are murky at best, and often don't tell you much about how the rest of the body was built.
At the end of the day, who is "the biggest" is a bit subjective, since (a) few people actually build a scale model of the largest specimens using actual measurements, (b) most giant sauropods are known from so few bones, so their proportions are sometimes poorly understood to begin with, and (c) most species are known from one or two specimens, a horrible sample size that gives no hints as to how large the biggest individuals of that species actually did get. So it's more accurate to say "the biggest known Patagotitan was probably bigger than the only known Puertasaurus or the only published Argentinosaurus." Not the "final verdict" people obsessively demand, but then again if paleontology was as well-funded as most other sciences, you might have a lot more specimens and a better idea of the upper limits.
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The Great Sauropoda
1 min read
Our good friend Gunnar (bricksmashtv) bricksmashtv.deviantart.com/ has put together a grand family tree of all known Sauropoda!
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So far, the ordering of this tree is so spot-on that I endorse about 99% of it. Which is good enough in my book. The few minor differences with my organization of titanosauriformes are easily debatable, and the handful of unranked species in each group are likewise debatable.
This is a really great and groundbreaking resource, check it out! And let Gunnar know if any species are missing. I don't think there's anything significant left out, but maybe you might catch something and help make this family tree even better!
<da:thumb id="691720261"/>
So far, the ordering of this tree is so spot-on that I endorse about 99% of it. Which is good enough in my book. The few minor differences with my organization of titanosauriformes are easily debatable, and the handful of unranked species in each group are likewise debatable.
This is a really great and groundbreaking resource, check it out! And let Gunnar know if any species are missing. I don't think there's anything significant left out, but maybe you might catch something and help make this family tree even better!
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