Earth’s largest ever animal? Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Fossilised bones from six dinosaurs may have belonged to the biggest animal ever to have walked the Earth.

The fossils, which include vertebrae and rib bones, are from six young adult dinosaurs, and were all found in the same Patagonian quarry in Argentina. The species, named Patagotitan mayorum, is thought to have weighed around 62 tonnes and measured more than 35 metres from nose to tail.

If you’re struggling to picture that, it’s about seven elephants, or more than two buses, or half the width of a football pitch, or somewhere between a standard swimming pool and an Olympic pool. That’s longer than Brachiosaurus was, and blue whales are today – both these species reach a maximum of about 30 metres.


Patagotitan lived 100 million years ago, during the Cretaceous period, and was a sauropod – a huge plant-eater with a long tail and neck, that stood on four legs.

The species has competition for the crown of largest ever land animal. A similar dinosaur called Argentinosaurus has been calculated to have weighed more than 80 tonnes, but Jose Carballido, from the Museo Paleontologico Egido Feruglio, Argentina, says vertebrae fossils suggest this species was in fact 10 per cent smaller than Patagotitan.

Journal reference: Proceedings of the Royal Society B, DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2017.1219

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