An otherwise standard meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology this year is making waves in science news due to one particular find. While it wouldn’t be the first time this dinosaur was found—its type species was discovered all the way back in 1972—it’s what they found about the dinosaur that’s making heads turn.
Or, really, turn all the way from left to right, should you happen to look upon its entire body; the recently-disclosed findings of a team led by lead author Brian Curtice, from the Arizona Museum of Natural History, fixed a fossil mix-up and figured out what may have been the longest dinosaur on record. It’s called the aptly-named Supersaurus—all 42 m (137 ft) of it.
The landmark findings by Curtice and team place this very long dinosaur to be about 39 m (128 ft) long at the minimum; it would have been so long that it would have given even the blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus), the largest animal to have ever lived on record, a run for its money. And if a blue whale could run, it would most certainly have to do, as even the fastest human on Earth would have taken a full four (4) seconds to run from Supersaurus’ tail tip to its snout.
Supersaurus was found all the way back in 1972, by an intrepid dinosaur field worker named Jim Jensen. Jensen encountered a bonebed chock-full with bones of what appeared to be several sauropods. Jensen eventually published their findings in the journal Great Basin Naturalist, where they separated the so-called fossil “bone salad” into three different dinosaurs: Supersaurus, Ultrasauros (not to be confused with the similarly-named Korean sauropod find Ultrasaurus), and Dystylosaurus.
Curtice and team combed over the data and samples obtained from Jensen’s earlier find, and now believes that what they believed to be pieces of Dystylosaurus and Ultrasauros were actually all just different pieces of Supersaurus all along. The team even returned to the Dry Mesa Dinosaur Quarry, the site in Colorado where Jensen originally found the so-called “bone salad” of Supersaurus, and started digging around for clues. The entire process leading up to the revelation of the findings took years to complete.
Curtice and team also used other Supersaurus findings to inform their study, including two specimens named “Jimbo” and “Goliath” from Wyoming. Thing is, “Goliath” has yet to be recognized as a formal specimen of Supersaurus; the recognition of “Goliath” would add even more credence to the findings of Curtice and team.
Said Curtice in a statement to Business Insider: “’Jimbo’ allowed us to inform our understanding of Supersaurus, so when we went back to the Dry Mesa Dinosaur Quarry we were able to go, ‘Oh, that looks like that. And that looks like that.’ Now ‘Goliath’ validates ‘Jimbo.’”
Determining the lengths of both “Jimbo” and “Goliath” allowed Curtice and team to get an average of the true length of Supersaurus when compared to their partial skeleton, which they believed to have been erroneously identified by Jensen to be three different dinosaurs. Only after analyzing the three specimens did Curtice and team arrive at their 39-42 m (128-137 ft) estimate.
Curtice continued: “What’s shocking to me is how close in length Goliath and Jimbo are. If you get three animals that are within a few feet of one another, now we know, ‘OK, that’s the average.'”
It should be noted, however, that while Supersaurus may be the longest dinosaur found so far, it wouldn’t have been the heaviest; that distinction belongs to Argentinosaurus, which may have weighed up to 82 metric tons (90 tons), nearly twice the weight of Supersaurus.
Supersaurus is among the growing list of long-necked dinosaurs called sauropods, which includes Australia’s Australotitan cooperensis find from earlier this year. Sauropods were a distinct branch of the dinosaur family tree whose roots lie deep into their history as animals; earlier sauropodomorph forms included Mussaurus, which made headlines earlier this year for the recently-unearthed evidence of herding within the species.
(For more dinosaur finds, check out how a study from this year may have revealed the origins of the famous spinosaurid dinosaurs.)
References
- Bendix, A. (2021, November 18). Scientists crowned the world’s longest dinosaur—A Supersaurus longer than 3 school buses from nose to tail. Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/supersaurus-worlds-longest-dinosaur-paleontology-2021-11
- Curtice, B. (2021, October 24). Supersaurus—World’s longest dinosaur. Fossil Crates. https://www.fossilcrates.com/blogs/news/supersaurus
- Curtice, B. (2021). NEW DRY MESA DINOSAUR QUARRY SUPERSAURUS VIVIANE (JENSEN 1985) AXIAL ELEMENTS PROVIDE ADDITIONAL INSIGHT INTO ITS PHYLOGENETIC RELATIONSHIPS AND SIZE, SUGGESTING AN ANIMAL THAT EXCEEDED 39 METERS IN LENGTH. In Society of Vertebrate Paleontology 2021 Annual Meeting (p. 92). Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. https://vertpaleo.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/SVP_2021_VirtualBook_final.pdf#page=92 (Original work published 2021)
- Geggel, L. (2021, November 15). Supersaurus might be the longest dinosaur that ever lived. LiveScience. https://www.livescience.com/supersaurus-longest-dinosaur-on-record
- Jensen, J. (1985). Three new sauropod dinosaurs from the Upper Jurassic of Colorado. Great Basin Naturalist, 45(4). https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/gbn/vol45/iss4/7
