Largest sauropods

[blaze]

I take back what I mentioned in my previous post, taking into account the more anterior position of the vertebrae it does seem to be comparable to Dreadnoughtus/Futalongkosaurus and contrary to what I said before based on the cervical, Puertasaurus does indeed appear to be larger still (with a proportionally smaller neck?) but Argentinosaurus without a doubt is the largest.

[mysterymeat]

blaze
Argentinosaurus looks A LOT bigger compared to Notocolossus and Dreadnoughtus.
I am interested to see how big that new Chubut Titanosaur is. The largest femur is a little shorter than estimated Argentinosaurus femur, while the dorsal vertebra look huge, judging from what I saw from the documentary

That's the position of that first flattened dorsal of in the Dreadnoughtus series?

[blaze]

Yeah, I was very disappointed that the paper didn't come out at around the same time as either the unveiling of the mount or the documentary and yes, the dorsals of Argentinosaurus look a lot bigger, the drawings have a certain degree of perspective distortion which made difficult to scale them but I doubt ortographic photos of the vertebrae are going to noticeably change how big they are. The most anterior dorsal of Dreadnoughtus is said to be a D4.

[spartan]

What's the state of the "Unnamed Patagonian titanosaur" from 2014? Is it still considered in the size range of Argentinosaurus?

[Deleted]

Mar 4, 2016 3:49:56 GMT 5 spartan said:

What's the state of the "Unnamed Patagonian titanosaur" from 2014? Is it still considered in the size range of Argentinosaurus?

Yes, it still is.

[Deleted]

Alamosaurus had osteoderms.

[mysterymeat]

There are some photos on the official MEF facebook page:
www.facebook.com/mefpatagonia/photos_stream?tab=photos_albums

Including images of some really big vertebra:



and this diagram of the skeleton mount:


If the cross-scaling is accurate, then this titanosaur seems quite short-armed.

[Deleted]

~40.5 meters in standing length? That's huge.

[spartan]

7 meter at the shoulders? Did I miss something?

[mysterymeat]

I don't understand how the shoulder could be 7 meters tall when the humerus seems to be 1.67m long, smaller than Notocolossus and Paralititan.
The Tibia is 1.5 meters long, shorter than referred tibia of Alamosaurus.
Yet the femur is 2.4 meters long, probably the largest complete sauropod femur known.
The mount doesn't seem to be that tall, and the one in NYC is smaller, at 37 meters or so.
We have to wait for the paper.

[blaze]

The hind leg proportions seem almost identical to Dreadnoughtus (tibia 62% of femur length), the proportions of the arm by itself don't seem very unusual, they too resemble Dreadnoughtus (ulna 65% of humerus length) but compared to the hind limb? a similar humerus to femur ratio is found in Opisthocoelicaudia but in that one the ulna is "normal" relative to the femur (similar ratio to Dreadnoughtus, 53-55%), giving away that the humerus is short and robust but that is not the case in that mount where the ulna is 40% of femur length, the whole arms seems too small. The mount is definitely not 7m tall at the shoulders, measuring the drawing it's shy of 6m.

So those unusual fore limb to hind limb proportions and that scapulocorocoid, if real (record breaking 3.3m long), gives me the idea that perhaps it's a composite of different sized individuals but yes we need the paper, hopefully it is published soon.

[mysterymeat]

is it stated that the scapulocoracoid is 3.3m long?

[blaze]

No but that's how big it is in the drawing, the scaling between the femur, tibia and humerus matches so the drawing seems accurate to the mount.

[Deleted]

The articulated Alamosaurus neck is finally published.

[creature386]

Mike Taylor and Matt Wedel talked about a huge Barosaurus specimen at the SVCPA, along with a specimen referred to Supersaurus which was even more enormous (a twice as long neck as the AMNH Barosaurus!):

The diplodocid sauropod Barosaurus is best known from the spectacular mounted skeleton in the atrium of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). Apart from the disproportionately long neck it is similar in size to Diplodocus — but did Barosaurus get bigger? BYU field jacket 3GR was collected from the Jensen/Jensen quarry, Utah, in 1966 but only recently prepared.[...] The centra of the AMNH cervicals C9—11 are 685, 737 and 775 mm long. That of vertebra C measures 1220 mm, making it 1.57—1.78 times longer. This suggests a neck length of 13.3—15.1 m based on 8.5 m for the AMNH specimen. BYU 9024 is an even larger cervical vertebra, referred to Supersaurus but indistinguishable from C9 of Barosaurus based on the characters above. At 1370 mm in total length, it is exactly twice the length of the AMNH C9, suggesting a neck 17 m long.

svpca.org/years/2016_liverpool/Abstract%20Bookv3.pdf
Mike did warn that there is some allometry at work here, so a twice as long neck does not necessarily suggest a twice as long animal. The results are still impressive though, if you think that linear extrapolation works here.