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Massive new dinosaur might be the largest creature to ever roam Earth:
The remains of the unnamed dinosaur were first discovered in 2012 in Neuquén Province of northwest Patagonia, but have still not been fully excavated.
[...] "Given the measurements of the new skeleton, it looks likely that this is a contender for one of the largest, if not the largest, sauropods that have ever been found," Paul Barrett, a paleobiologist at the Natural History Museum in London who was not involved in the study, told Live Science.
[...] "The place of the finding is very hard to access, so the logistics is pretty complicated," lead study author Alejandro Otero, a paleontologist at La Plata Museum in Argentina, told Live Science. "But we expect to return there after the pandemic situation."
The remains themselves date to about 98 million years ago, meaning the creature lived during the Cretaceous period.
[...] Right now, the researchers can't say how large the new titanosaur was, given that the long limb bones used to make such estimates, such as the humerus and femur, have not yet been excavated. However, analyses of the bones that have been found — including 24 vertebrae of the tail and parts of the pelvic and pectoral girdle — show that it was most likely the largest of the titanosaurs.
[...] "It is a huge dinosaur, but we expect to find much more of the skeleton in future field trips, so we'll have the possibility to address with confidence how big it really was," Otero said.
Journal Reference:
Alejandro Otero, José L. Carballido, Leonardo Salgado et al. Report of a giant titanosaur sauropod from the Upper Cretaceous of Neuquén Province, Argentina, Cretaceous Research (DOI: 10.1016/j.cretres.2021.104754)
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 22 2021, @01:48PM (8 children)
Birds are dinosaurs in all but name, and most of them can fly. Dinosaurs, and pterosaurs, had more in common with birds than with today's reptiles.
They didn't fly (except the ones that became birds). They used them to control their temperature, to keep their skin clean, or for their appearance.
There is water on every planet or large moon except Mercury and Io (and there might even be a little bit on them). There is no water on the surface of Venus, of course, due to the temperature, but there is some in the atmosphere; about 1/3 as much (by mass, not by concentration) as in Earth's atmosphere. Most of the moons in the outer solar system are primarily water. The only moons that don't have water are the ones that are basically just asteroids, plus Io because Io is super weird. Even the Earth's moon has trace amounts of water.
Heat from gravitational collapse plus radioactive decay. Depending on the specific planet or moon in question, tidal heating is also a factor.
Photosynthetic life changed it into coal and oil. We are doing our best to change it all back.
There was a lot of photosynthetic life back then. See the previous question. Good thing, too. See the last question.
Because not all planets are the same. Venus is similar to Earth, but it's not the same. Mars is quite different because it is much smaller. Neither of those planets has a magnetic field, Venus because it barely rotates and Mars because it is too small and its core has cooled. This has a tremendous effect on the atmospheres of these planets. Also note that by mass, Venus has four times as much nitrogen in its atmosphere as Earth does. It is just that it has so much more carbon dioxide. A better question would be why Earth has so little CO2. The answer to that is that most of it is in the mantle, which is why volcanoes emit it. Studies of volcanic emissions and geology imply that there is enough CO2 in Earth's mantle, if it were all released, to form a CO2 atmosphere twice as thick as Venus's. CO2 is also removed by weathering (reacting with surface rocks and water to form carbonates) and, as mentioned, by life. The oxygen, of course, is also produced by life. If not for photosynthesis, all that oxygen would be CO2, and Earth would be a slightly cooler version of Venus.
Not going to bother reading this, I assume it's some creationist horseshit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 22 2021, @02:55PM (6 children)
> Photosynthetic life changed it into coal and oil.
Yes, have you considered what happens to the thickness of the atmosphere when you remove most of the two main components?
And what moon is mostly water?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 22 2021, @06:06PM (5 children)
It gets thinner? Now you know why Earth's atmosphere is thinner than Venus's. But most of the "missing" CO2 (relative to Venus, anyway) is in the mantle.
All the large moons of Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus, except for Io, are at least 40% water by mass, and more by volume. Tethys has probably the most water by mass, being something like 95% water. Titan sees your water and raises a thick nitrogen-rich atmosphere. Triton and all the well-studied Kuiper Belt objects, including Pluto and its large moons, may have slightly less water proportionally, but only because it's cold enough for them to also have large amounts of ammonia and even solid nitrogen. They are still all 25-30% water or more, far more water than is found on Earth. If you insist on liquid water, then you'll have to restrict yourself to Europa, Enceladus, and Triton... as far as we know for sure. But Pluto and most of the large moons of Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus are good candidates. Pluto is probably the most likely, followed by Callisto.
Many of the medium-size moons also have large amounts of water, but there are too many of them to list and it's unlikely that any of them have liquid water.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 22 2021, @08:42PM
Yes, in the past it was much thicker. This provided the buoyancy required for the giant dinosaurs to survive.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 22 2021, @10:27PM (3 children)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tethys_%28moon%29 [wikipedia.org]
So they are just assuming it is not hollow or something. Also that is yet another moon with that "deathstar dimple" that looks like what you see when you crack a hard boiled egg.
What is the explanation for these dimples? Was the object formerly liquid with a shell and an air bubble got trapped underneath, then the shell was removed somehow?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 23 2021, @02:58AM
You figured it out! Aghartha is in there!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 24 2021, @02:05PM (1 child)
Couldn't it just be a large & old impact crater?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 24 2021, @08:39PM
Probably a massive electrical discharge. OH NOES! It's the Electric Universe wackos!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 22 2021, @06:14PM
That's debatable. I favor Thomas Gold's theory of abiogenic origin for most of the coal, gas, and oil. In any case, most of the carbon actually gets laid down as limestone by shellfish. They deposit about 1% of the carbon in the biosphere per century. If it wasn't for volcanoes and oil seeps replacing it life would go extinct in about 10,000 years.