an autodidact meets a dilettante…

Okay I was going to write about the intriguing and tragic figure Ludwig Boltzmann, in keeping with my plan to write connected pieces, but today’s ‘wow’ news reports about ginormous dinosaur bones found in Argentina – already the domain of the largest dino ever found, the sauropod Argentinosaurus – have proved just too irresistible. Ludwig will have to wait. I learned about Argentinosaurus earlier this year while researching dinosaurs for another post, but this recent discovery is of what’s believed to be a new species of titanosaur or giant herbivore. You’ll see pics of the giant thigh bone all over the net, usually with some dusty palaeontologist or farm worker snuggled against it, but scientists are cautioning against too much speculation about this beast’s proportions in comparison to that of Argentinosaurus, from the relatively scant remains found so far. We do love to see records broken, don’t we? In any case the animal’s femur looks like taking the record of biggest bone ever found.

Of course, even if this unnamed beastie was 77 tonnes, as some pundit has calculated it, compared to 70 tonnes for Argentinosaurus, that doesn’t prove that one species in general was larger than the other. Argentinosaurus’ weight has been based on even more scant remains. Take a look at a range of websites, including Wikipedia’s entry on dinosaurs, and you’ll find quite a range of values for the weight of Argentinosaurus. It’s not quite wild speculation, but it’s speculation nonetheless. I’m also wondering, from my profoundly non-expert perspective, if these bones from what is now Argentina reveal the limited range of those creatures or if they’re largely a result of a combination of the right kinds of preservatives – soil type, climatic conditions and so forth – prevailing in that region.

It’s a great time for dinosaur fans. A new species of long-snouted tyrannosaur, named Pinocchio rex, has recently been unearthed, ‘remarkably well-preserved’, in southern China. It’s estimated to have lived about 66 mya, in the late Cretaceous, the last period of the dinosaurs. Not quite the size of T rex, it may have been faster and nimbler. One expert described it as a cheetah to T rex’s lion, because the two tyrannosaurs lived and hunted in the same regions, chasing different prey.

Our new Titanosaur also hails from the Late Cretaceous, though probably earlier than P rex (the Late Cretaceous extends more than 30 million years, from 100 to 66mya).

Incidentally, the record for the smallest dinosaur goes to a birdie from 120 mya called Quiliana, weighing in at 15 grams. Well, that’s according to this site. Wikipedia describes the smallest dinosaur as weighing about 110 grams and measuring about 35 cms but they don’t include ‘avialan’ dinosaurs (i.e. birds). In fact, just about every site I’ve checked out describes a different species. But if you accept, as many do, that birds are dinosaurs, then the smallest dinosaur ever is still with us. The bee hummingbird is only about 5 centimetres long and weighs about 2 grams.