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Researchers said on Monday that the fossils represented a species of dinosaur named Ninjatitan zapatai that lived 140 million years ago during the Cretaceous Period. They identified Ninjatitan as a titanosaur, a group of herbivorous, long-necked dinosaurs that walked on four pillar-shaped legs.
The incomplete skeletal remains of the dinosaur were discovered in the wilderness of Argentine Patagonia, south of the town of Neuquen. Researchers said Ninjatitan demonstrated that titanosaurs as a group first appeared longer than previously known.
“This is the oldest known record, not only from Argentina but from around the world,” lead study author Pablo Gallina, a researcher at Argentina’s National Council for Scientific and Technical Research, told Reuters. (CONICET).
“Titanosaurs are recorded from different parts of the world, but the earliest known records were more modern than this find.”
About 65 feet (20 meters) long, Ninjatitan was a large dinosaur, but much smaller than later titanosaurs such as the Argentinosaurus which reached a length of around 115 feet (35 meters). The researchers also said that the presence of such an early titanosaur in Patagonia supports the idea that the titanosaurs originated in the southern hemisphere.
Titanosaurs are part of a larger group of dinosaurs called sauropods which includes others with similar body designs such as the Brontosaurus and Diplodocus that lived in North America during the Jurassic Period, which preceded the Cretaceous Period.
A number of titanosaurs that inhabited Patagonia reached gigantic proportions such as the Argentinosaurus, Patagotitan, and Dreadnoughtus.
José Luis Carbadillo, another CONICET researcher, told a local academic publication that the age of Ninjatitan’s remains may have led people to assume that the bones belonged to a group of dinosaurs that predate the titanosaurs.
“In Patagonia, titanosaurs have only been known for less than 120 million years,” he said.
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