Palaeontology

New species of giant dinosaur discovered

By T.K. Randall
March 29, 2015 ·  6 comments

Titanosaurs were some of the largest land animals ever to exist. Image Credit: CC BY-SA 3.0 Nobu Tamura Discovered on the banks of the Kiya River in Western Siberia, the new species, which would have been one of the largest of all dinosaurs, has been nicknamed "Sibirosaurus" and would have grown to a height of 40 meters while weighing in at 90 tons.

The fossils proved very difficult to extract from the rocks and it took a team of Russian experts the better part of four years to determine that they belonged to a new species."When we discovered this finding, it was only clear that the remains belonged to a very large herbivorous dinosaur from the sauropods group," said Dr Stepan Ivantsov.

"Now after work on the extraction of all the remnants and the restoration (of the bones) are almost completed, we can confidently say that we have found a new species, and maybe even genus."

Having thrived at the end of the Cretaceous era, Sibirosaurus would have been a formidable sight despite its penchant for eating plants and weighed the equivalent of nine elephants.

Source: Telegraph | Comments (6)

Tags: Dinosaur, Sibirosaurus