dinosaur as big as 14 elephants

That's huge.

I was surprised though when I googled to compare the size of an elephant to a blue whale, and guess what?

It would take FORTY elephants to be the equiv of a blue whale.

Of course, the blue whale can get larger because it's in the water. Nothing that big could be on land.

yup, blue whales r bloody big

I tried to tag this
dinosaur as big as 14 elephants
but it didn't take. Too long I'm a guessing.

I just tagged it Big Ass Dinosaur.

Maybe that covers it.

And don't forget that the man lying prone next to that bone is a midget - or somebody used photoshop.

uh, they prefer to be called little people ci.

Personally, I'd prefer midget if I was one, but no one asked me.

Have they 'aged' those humongous beasts of prey? It seems 95 to 100 million years ago. That means that the continents were still not separated as they are today, so it's possible that South America and Africa were one land mass.

If that's the case, it seems those same dinosaurs lived in Africa. The evolution of life on this planet evolved so much, I doubt we're able to determine the process of life on this planet.

I don't know the sequence of events, CI.

Here, edgar, take a gander at this link.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGcDed4xVD4

The zone between Africa and South America had always been a volcanic "suture" area with a series of narrow sea lanes (like Baja California). It was an area called The "Dom Feliciano Belt" So there was an area roughly from todays Brazil to Tierra del Fuego that hd a bout a 50 mi wide strip of ocean separating Africa from it. North of that there was a free exchange of animals (some of the biggest African dinos are actually found in the Sahara.
Then, about 110 million years ago, all of S America began rifting from Africa in earnest, pretty much isolating The American dinos from the rest of the world species. South America was being pushed into North America but after about 80 million years the East-West rifting of the area that would become the Gulf of Mexico started and this began the separation of North America from South America for tens of millions of years. That's why South America in post dinosaur days had a different set of pinnacle predators than did North America.(Giant Killer birds in South v mammal predators in the North).

Rogers and Santosh's Continents and Supercontinents is still one of the best treatises on rifting and continental drift through geologic time

From the BBC webpage.


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-27452713

So this is the largest dinosaur, and it's from Argentina, but the name Argentinosaurus has already been nabbed by the second largest dinosaur. Looks like Argentina jumped the boat a bit too soon. Apparently the name Falklandosaurus is still available.

How about "Irving."

Or Berlin.

Thanks, farmerman. It's helpful to have somebody who have studied geology as you have, and to share your knowledge on a2k.

It's worth remembering that the vast majority of fossils that we find represent the most common organisms that existed, not the most rare. And the chance that we will ever find *the* largest individual, or even *the* largest species is pretty slim.

Things like T-Rex, Quetzalcoatlus, Tylosaurus and all the others seem very exotic to us, and they paint a picture in our minds of what that world may have looked like back then. But I think we've probably only seen 10% or less of the fauna that existed across 300 million years. And I'm not even sure it's 10%, it might be as small as a fraction of a percent. We are probably still only even aware of a tiny slice of the flora and fauna of the Mesozoic.

Sounds right to me too! Trying to evaluate what happened millions of years ago to what life forms dominated this planet will be impossible, not only because of evolution, but because many life forms disappeared. Two ice ages is pretty dramatic.

True enough, but the glimpses we are getting are very exciting.

Agreed. And the counterpoint to my earlier post is that while we have still only seen a tiny percentage of what existed, we still know quite a bit. And that's because organisms don't just pop out of nowhere. Evolution really happens. So even the small glimpses of individuals we get, reveal whole branches of the biological tree. Our ability to infer the biology around an individual is reminiscent of our ability to infer the structure of an organism from just a few fossilized bones (which is all we usually get from most finds).

Our ability to deduce associated biology is strongest at the center or most common point. Where it begins to fail is at the extremes or most exotic (such as "Largest" or "Fastest" or "most colorful"). Those types of things are always going to be the most difficult to identify.

When I was a kid (about 10 or 11 in the 60's, my dad was a fan of a comedian named Brother Dave. (He was like a fake preacher from the south). There was an album "Kick Thy own Self" (I think that was the name). In there he he did this thing about fossil humN

"wE DIDNT ARISE FROM THE FOSIL NEANDERTHALS MEN OF OLD. WE ACTUALLY AROSE FROM THE FAST LITTLE FUCKERS THAT MDE IT BACK TO THE CAVE"
He was sorta right .

Fossils were most often the evolutionary dead ends by the bazillions and weve made more value of their evolutionary worth by tracing their various changes from one time layer to another. Its like trying to trace your family path only by looking at photos of pictures of your great great grand cousins.