They discovered in San Juan the oldest giant dinosaur in history; It's 205 million years old

One day in 2015, while the paleontology team of the Institute and the Museum of Natural Sciences of the & # 39; 39; University of San Juan was doing his annual campaign in the region Diego Abelín, one of the technicians, gave the alarm signal: he had found very big bones

"Diego is a technician who always finds good things – he counts San Juan Cecilia Apaldetti, a paleontologist from Conicet who is part of the museum team – he thought he found cow bones, but a little jokingly shouted: "J & # 39; found a giant dinosaur. "When we got closer, we had a huge surprise, so big in these Tribadic rock levels (very old) We put a still camera and started taking pictures, we imagined that it would be something transcendent. "

What Abelín had found, Apaldetti, Ricardo Martínez and his colleagues were in fact the remains of two specimens of a new species of herbivorous dinosaurs 205 million years ago. As it was believed that the phenomenon of gigantism had begun some 180 million years ago, the discovery of
Ingentia prima (the "first immense", in Latin), as they were named, leads us to revise the theories on the gigantism of "terrible lizards."

"The first dinosaurs appear in the About 233 million years ago, but at first, its size was relatively small – explains Martin Ezcurra, researcher at Conicet at the Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales, who did not participate in the study most were about two meters tall. It was only at the end of the Jurbadic and Cretaceous that they measured up to 40 meters and weighed up to 70 tons. "

The specimens unearthed in San Juan, and whose description is published today with the signature of Apaldetti as first author, Martínez, Ignacio Cerda, Diego Pol and Oscar Alcober in the magazine
Nature Ecology & Evolution belong to the family sauropods, measured about eight meters long and weighing nearly 10 tons. In other words, they were three times the size of the largest dinosaurs of the time and were a bit bigger than a current African elephant. Scientists are euphoric because such an important specimen of such an evolutionary era has never been found.

"It's a very noticeable finding important, because it leads us to rethink what were the stages of evolution to develop this impressive gigantism of dinosaurs – said of Paris, where He participates in the International Congress of Paleontology, Diego Pol, co-author of the work .. What an organization acquires this huge size is something that has happened only once in the history of life on Earth Finding the first giants is essential to understand what has allowed them to grow so much, even though from one point of view, this size gave them a nsiva advantage against predation, on the other hand it needed a fantastic amount of energy to support its own weight s, walk, move, reproduce … He presented multiple biomechanical challenges, since his body was subjected to very strong pressures. That's why an elephant can not run, because his bones would not stand him. "

The new specimens are about 30 million years older than the oldest known, that is to say that gigantism occurred much earlier.It would have occurred about ten or so years ago. fifteen million years after the appearance of the great saurians, although the reasons for this phenomenon still remain a mystery.