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Large scale: paleontologists have discovered in North America the largest dinosaur foot ever survived. According to his badysis, the 150 million year old bones are a close relative of the herbivorous Brachiosaurus. However, despite its big feet, the animal was probably not the biggest that ever traveled our planet. Other saurians have probably still exceeded its size – but no foot bones have been preserved there.
Giant herbivores: sauropods lived on a large foot.
© Xubingruo / istock 
The age of the dinosaurs has produced giant lizards. Most importantly, the herbivores of the sauropod group have reached gigantic proportions with sizes of more than 20 meters and sometimes more than 50 tons. Brachiosaurus, Diplodocus and Co are still considered the largest terrestrial animals ever inhabited on our planet.
A giant foot
Paleontologists around Anthony Maltese of the University of Kansas at Lawrence have an impressive proof of this enormous anatomy discovered. They studied a partially preserved foot that had been found in the Black Hills, Wyoming, 20 years ago. "It was immediately clear that this foot about one meter wide had to come from an extremely large animal," says Maltese.
© KUVP Archives
But from what? To find out, scientists have examined the bones more closely.After a detailed study of the 150 million-year-old fossil, they compared their results with the size of the feet of different species of sauropods.For the representatives of this dino group were at the time obviously distributed in the region around the locality.
Not the largest
The badyzes confirmed that the fossil is the most great foot of a sauropod ever found.It therefore belongs to a prehistoric giant than from the Brachiosauridae group with a height of about four meters. What kind is exactly, is not clear – but it must be in the eyes of researchers, but a close relative of the famous Brachiosaurus. These dinosaurs averaged 23 meters long and 13 meters high.
Despite its record-sized foot, the dinosaur was not the largest in the world: "There are traces and bones of Australia and Argentina. have not received the foot, "says co-author Emanuel Tschopp of the American Museum of Natural History in New York.An example is the Argentinosaurus, which was estimated to be 30 meters long and weighing 70 tons. In North America, however, the dinosaur belonging to the giant foot might actually have been one of the largest animals of his time
Great Range
However, this is not only The extent of the discovery is interesting.The researchers also report that it is the northernmost discovery of a Brachiosauridae representative in the so-called Morrison Formation – a sedimentary sequence in the western United States and Canada since the end of the Jurbadic.
"This shows that these sauropods populated a large distribution area from eastern Utah to northwestern Wyoming," write Maltese and his colleagues. "It's surprising, because many other sauropods did not seem so prevalent at the time." (Peer J., 2018, doi: 10.7717 / acej.5250)
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