REPOST: PALEONEWS: Monstrous Dinosaur Found In Texas

[Betty Cunningham <bettyc@flyinggoat.com>]

I have found where they archived this story and include both the URL and
the story in this repost
http://www.discovery.com/news/archive/news20000107/brief1.html?ct=387a5597

 Monstrous Dinosaur Found In Texas 

Jan. 7, 2000 -- Texas paleontologists have discovered a hulking giant of
a dinosaur with a neck more than 30 feet long and a vertebra weighing up
to 1,200 pounds. The researchers say the fossil is probably by far the
largest dinosaur ever found in the Lone Star State. 

 "This thing is just bloody enormous," says Homer Montgomery, a
paleontologist at the University of Texas at Dallas, who along with his
students found the creature in a wilderness area of South Texas Big
Bend National Park last fall. 

 Montgomery and his team were able to haul out the two smallest
cervical, or neck, vertebrae -- one weighing 367 pounds and the other
470 pounds -- by hand before leaving the dig for the winter. 

 Most of the creature remains in the ground near an established bone bed
full of juvenile Alamosaurus remains dating to the Late Cretaceous, only
a few million years before dinosaurs died out. 

 Alamosaurus, part of a dinosaur family known as titanosaurs, was the
last of the long-necked dinosaurs called sauropods to roam North
America, but is so far known only from scattered and broken remains. The
23-foot length of the new dinosaurs neck may represent the largest
intact section of the largest Alamosaurus ever found. 

  But its monstrous dimensions also suggest that it could be an entirely
new species that exceeds the accepted 70-foot length of Alamosaurus
adults by some 30 feet, Montgomery says. 

"We know so little about this dinosaur that any find is important and
something this large is doubly so," says Tony Fiorillo, a paleontologist
at the Dallas Museum of Natural History who has also worked in Big Bend. 

 Montgomery plans to return to the remote desert site in February to
remove more of the 10 vertebrae his team  has already exposed and to
excavate ribs and other bones protruding from the ground. 

As the largest of the vertebrae measures more than five feet across and
weighs about 1,200 pounds, a helicopter may eventually have to airlift
the ancient creature out of the wilderness, says National Park Service
geologist Don Corrick. 



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