US claims largest dinosaur foot ever discovered


25-07-2018 03:03 AM

Ammon News - AMMONNEWS - About 150 million years ago, a giant, long-necked dinosaur stomped on the ground in the Western US state of Wyoming and left behind what researchers said Tuesday is the largest dinosaur foot ever discovered.

The foot bones, found beneath a series of tail bones, extend about three feet (one meter) wide and are believed to belong to a brachiosaur, from a group of extinct herbivores known as sauropods, said the findings in the journal PeerJ.

This is an “exceptionally large foot, bigger than the elements of all other known sauropod foot bones,” lead author Anthony Maltese, of the Rocky Mountain Dinosaur Resource Center in Woodland Park, Colorado, told AFP in an email.

“I get asked often what’s the biggest/longest/whatever superlative dinosaur that ever existed, and in this case I can actually provide an answer now,” he said.

To give a sense of the creature’s immense size, its thigh bone alone measured nearly 6.8 feet (2.07 meters).

That said, the Wyoming brachiosaur is not the largest dinosaur known to man other excavations have turned up fossils from animals that were likely larger but it is the biggest foot in evidence.

“There are tracks and other incomplete skeletons from Australia and Argentina that seem to be from even bigger animals, but those gigantic skeletons were found without the feet,” said co-author Emanuel Tschopp, a postdoctoral fellow in the American Museum of Natural History’s Division of Paleontology.

“This beast was clearly one of the biggest that ever walked in North America.”

The discovery also extends the known northern range of brachiosaurs, showing they roamed a vast area from Utah to Wyoming, added Maltese.

“Brachiosaurs are pretty rare as far as dinosaurs go, and being able to really expand their geographical range by hundreds of kilometers is exciting and may well help us understand them much better,” he said.

*AFP




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