An undated handout illustration of a Dreadnoughtus dinosaur. (Jennifer Hall via The New York Times)

Eighty-five feet long, 30 feet tall, 130,000 pounds and still growing when it died, this dinosaur is among the largest land animals that ever lived - so big its discoverers are calling it the Dreadnoughtus.Its skeleton, unearthed in the Patagonia region of Argentina, is the most complete ever found of one of these gargantuan dinosaurs, scientists reported Thursday. A team led by Kenneth J. Lacovara, a paleontologist at Drexel University in Philadelphia, describe the fossil in the journal Scientific Reports.Even what remains of the bones is huge."We've got 16 tons of bone in my lab right now," Lacovara said.The better known Apatosaurus dinosaur, once commonly called Brontosaurus, weighed only 75,000 pounds; for comparison, an empty Boeing 737-900 weighs about 93,700 pounds.Lacovara discovered the fossil in 2005, along with a smaller Dreadnoughtus. It took four years to excavate the skeletons, which were shipped to Philadelphia by container ship, then several more to prepare and study the more than 200 bones of Dreadnoughtus, representing 45 percent of the skeleton. That includes most of the vertebrae of its muscular tail.Dreadnoughtus lived sometime from 84 million to 66 million years ago. It was one of a group of sauropod dinosaurs known as titanosaurs. Most of the gargantuan members of titanosaurs are known from only a few bones. The more complete remains of Dreadnoughtus, including a 6-foot-tall thigh bone, enabled a more definite estimate of the mass.The researchers performed laser scans of all of the bones and published 3-D models of each. That could allow other paleontologists to study the fossil from afar and even print three-dimensional replicas of the bones. Lacovara and his collaborators are undertaking additional research to use the models to study how Dreadnoughtus moved.Even some softer tissues like tendons were preserved, and the scientists are trying to extract proteins and possibly DNA from some of the bones.

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Its full name is Dreadnoughtus schrani - for the Dreadnought, the almost invincible World War I-era battleship, and Adam Schran, a technology entrepreneur who helped finance the research.