Thanks fieldmarshaldj, and you're correct, there was an earlier topic on this, so no ping for now. Oh look, some complete moron put piltdownman into the keywords.
Posted on 10/01/2018 9:50:37 AM PDT by ETL
Named Ledumahadi mafube, the new dinosaur species weighed 12 tons, stood about 13 feet high at the hips, and is one of the closest relatives of sauropod dinosaurs.
Sauropods, weighing up to 60 tons, include well-known species like Brontosaurus. They ate plants and stood on four legs, with a posture like modern elephants.
Ledumahadi mafube evolved its giant size independently from sauropods.
“It shows us that even as far back as 200 million years ago, these animals had already become the largest vertebrates to ever walk the Earth,” said Professor Jonah Choiniere, a researcher in the Evolutionary Studies Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand.
“Many giant dinosaurs walked on four legs but had ancestors that walked on two legs,” said Professor Roger Benson, a scientist in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Oxford and the Evolutionary Studies Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand.
“Paleontologists want to know about this evolutionary change, but amazingly, no-one came up with a simple method to tell how each dinosaur walked, until now.”
-snip-
The method involved taking measurements of the thickness of dinosaur’s limbs to infer their weight and how many limbs that weight must have been carried on.
The team’s findings suggest not only that this dinosaur was a quadruped, but also that many other early sauropodomorph dinosaurs (often called ‘prosauropods’) were experimenting with walking on all fours.
“The discovery shows that gigantic body sizes were possible in early four-legged prosauropods, which arose from earlier two-legged species,” the paleontologists said.
“However, the early quadrupeds lacked the columnar, elephant-like limb postures of later sauropod species such as Brontosaurus.”
“The evolution of sauropods isn’t quite as straightforward as we once thought,” Professor Choiniere said.
(Excerpt) Read more at sci-news.com ...
*ping*
Alternative story to this one, I believe:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3691508/posts
They put their right foot in, they took their right foot out...
New 26,000-pound dinosaur discovery was Earth’s largest land animal
CNN | 09/27/2018 | By Ashley Strickland
Posted on 09/28/2018 7:36:01 AM PDT by Red Badger
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3691508/posts
Thanks fieldmarshaldj, and you're correct, there was an earlier topic on this, so no ping for now. Oh look, some complete moron put piltdownman into the keywords.
*I* am the archetypal sauropod.
;-)
;-) ;-)
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