News of the new titan spread quickly. Last January, a cast of the sauropod went on display at the American Museum of Natural History, while legendary naturalist David Attenborough released a documentary about its discovery. And now, Carballido and his team have finally published an official scientific description of the dinosaur. They’ve also given it a name—Patagotitan mayorum. The first half refers to the Patagonian region where the dinosaur was found. The second half honors the Mayo family who kindly welcomed the scientists onto their land and into their kitchen.

After careful analysis, the team think that Patagotitan is slightly smaller than they previously thought—69 tons or so. But even after that downsizing, it’s still twice as heavy as more familiar giants like Brachiosaurus and Apatosaurus, and 10 percent bigger than the previous record-holder—another Argentinian titanosaur called Argentinosaurus. For now, it’s the biggest dinosaur for which we have accurate measurements, and perhaps the biggest land animal that ever lived.

“We have a decent idea how well the various methods for estimating dinosaur body mass work, and they tend to agree well enough most of the time,” says John Hutchinson from the Royal Veterinary College. “Even taking into account the uncertainty of those methods, Patagotitan comes out as a 60- to 80-ton behemoth. And nothing else we know of yet comes very close.”

Patagotitan cast, in a hangar. D. Pol.

Patagotitan lived during the Cretaceous period around 101 million years ago. And for some reason, it frequented the area that eventually became the Mayo family’s farm. Carballido and Pol’s team returned to the site more than a dozen times, disinterring every fossil they could find. In the process, they built a road and partially removed a hill. Eventually, they recovered bones from at least six Patagotitan individuals. And their bones reveal that they were in their prime—young, still growing, and not yet at their full adult size.

Carballido thinks that these individuals all died at different times, but he has no idea why they all died in this one place. He found the teeth of many meat-eating dinosaurs around the site, but he doubts any predator could have tackled such gargantuan prey. “They were too strong,” he says. “It would have been too risky for a carnivore.” Whatever their reasons, their attraction to this one place meant that Carballido’s team eventually uncovered more than 200 Patagotitan bones, covering most of the animal’s skeleton. “The most amazing moment for us was realizing that the dinosaur is not only large, but also more complete than any other titanosaur,” Carballido says.

It’s ironic that scientists have found very little of the largest animals to have walked the land. We only know that Argentinosaurus existed based on a few handfuls of bones—some vertebrae, ribs, and leg bones, most of which are incomplete. Puertasaurus, another contender for the record books, is known from just four vertebrae. There are near-complete skeletons for some titanosaurs like Futalognkosaurus, but these were smaller species that weighed in at just 50 tons or so. The true colossi of the dinosaurs are hard to come by.