Re: 105-foot dinosaur unearthed in Patagonia

[Jamie Stearns <stearns5@cox.net>]

Oops, I seem to have sent this message offlist the first time I tried 
sending it. Here goes again...

I figure a lot of newspapers and such will start reprting this as "THE
BIGGEST EVER!" soon, but this is not actually the largest dinosaur in terms
of length, as even the news article acknowledges; in fact, even if we limit
it to dinosaurs that are relatively complete, it only comes in second, as
the two known specimens of Supersaurus both exceed it in length. (106 feet
for the WDC specimen, 110 feet for the holotype, compared to 105 feet for
the new titanosaur.) Mackovicky's statement that North America's dinosaurs
aren't anywhere near the size of South American ones doesn't seem to hold up
here, unless of course we're talking about weight.

Anyhow, now that that's out of the way, I'm glad to see that a relatively
complete skeleton of a big titanosaur has been found at last.  All those
fragmentary specimens generating wild guesses as to size should be falling
into place fairly soon thanks to this one, though I'd really like to see a
fairly complete tail from one of these things at some point, as that's where
a lot of the uncertainty comes form.