Dinosaur bones found in Argentina may have belonged to the largest and heaviest such creatures ever to trod the prehistoric earth, some as massive as nearly 80 tons, paleontologists say.
Near a town called El Sombrero in central Argentina, the bones of seven individuals of a sauropod subgroup known as Titanosaur were uncovered.
Possibly weighing ten times as much as the current record holder, dubbed Argentinosaurus, the newly discovered and as yet unnamed dinosaur would have stood around 65 feet high with it neck held up and around 130 feet long, a measurement of the femur of the largest individual suggests.
That femur -- the thighbone -- is taller than the average man, the scientists said.
"Given the size of these bones, which surpass any of the previously known giant animals, the new dinosaur is the largest animal known that walked on Earth," researchers said.
The seven specimens, found together in a desert fossil site in Argentina's remote Patagonia region first uncovered in 2011, may have all died at the same time, possibly of dehydration or from being trapped by mud.
In all, around 150 bones said to be in remarkable condition have been found, all linked to the seven individual dinosaurs.
The dinosaurs lived between 100 and 95 years ago in a region of Patagonia that would have forested at the time, the paleontologists say.
While the long-necked herbivores were undeniably huge, some experts are holding off bestowing a "world's largest" tag on them.
That's because it is often difficult to ascertain an accurate size and weight when working with incomplete skeletons, they say.
While the new discovery is undeniably "a genuinely big critter," says dinosaur expert Paul Barrett of the Natural History Museum in London, further research is needed to cement that claim.
The previous record-holder, Argentinosaurus, was first thought to weigh in at 100 tons, a claim that was later reduced to 70 tons.
"Without knowing more about this current find it's difficult to be sure," Barrett says. "One problem with assessing the weight of both Argentinosaurus and this new discovery is that they're both based on very fragmentary specimens -- no complete skeleton is known, which means the animal's proportions and overall shape are conjectural."
