The animal was about 27 meters long and weighed around 27 tonnes, which the BBC likened to nine adult Asian elephants. Researchers from the UK and Thailand have now named it Nagatitan chaiyaphumensis, the largest dinosaur ever found in Southeast Asia.
The fossils turned up beside a pond in northeastern Thailand about a decade ago. The team’s study appeared in the journal Scientific Reports. By examining vertebrae, ribs, pelvis bones and leg bones, they worked out the body size. A single front leg bone measured 1.78 meters, roughly the height of a person.
Nagatitan was a sauropod, one of the long-necked plant eaters that include Diplodocus and Brontosaurus. It lived in the Early Cretaceous, between 100 and 120 million years ago. The scientists placed it among the somphospondylan sauropods, in a subgroup called Euhelopodidae that is known only from Asia.
A name with local roots
“Naga” is the serpent of Thai and Southeast Asian legend. “Titan” nods to the giants of Greek myth. The species name honors Chaiyaphum, the province where the bones were found. Nagatitan is the 14th dinosaur species formally named in Thailand.
The work was led by scientists at University College London, with Mahasarakham University, Suranaree University of Technology and Thailand’s Sirindhorn Museum. The National Geographic Society paid for the research. A life-size reconstruction is on display at the Thainosaur Museum at Asiatique in Bangkok.
“The last titan”
Lead author Thitiwoot (Perth) Sethapanichsakul, a Thai PhD student at UCL, says the team calls the animal “the last titan” of Thailand. The bones came from the country’s youngest dinosaur-bearing rock formation. “Younger rocks laid down towards the end of the time of the dinosaurs are unlikely to contain dinosaur remains because the region by then had become a shallow sea,” he said. “So this may be the last or most recent large sauropod we will find in Southeast Asia.”
He put the size in perspective too. Nagatitan likely weighed at least 10 tonnes more than Dippy the Diplodocus, but it is still dwarfed by Patagotitan at 60 tonnes or Ruyangosaurus at 50 tonnes.
The river setting was crowded. Fish, freshwater sharks and crocodiles lived in the water. On land, smaller iguanodontians and early ceratopsians shared the area with giant predators, among them carcharodontosaurians and spinosaurids, while pterosaurs hunted fish above the river. The region was dry to semi-dry then, which sauropods seem to have favored. Researchers think the long necks and tails may have helped the animals shed heat.
UCL’s Professor Paul Upchurch, a co-author, told National Geographic it was “a little odd that sauropods were able to cope with higher temperature conditions,” since large bodies hold heat and are hard to cool. He told Reuters that high temperatures probably affected the plants the animals ate. Atmospheric carbon dioxide was rising along with global temperatures at the time. The fossils were studied in both countries, and 3D scanning and printing let the team collect data without traveling.
More to come
Dr. Sita Manitkoon of Mahasarakham University, the project leader, said Thailand has “possibly the third most abundant” dinosaur remains in Asia. Systematic study there is only about 40 years old, counting from the first dinosaur named in 1986, and a younger generation of paleontologists is now taking up the work.
Sethapanichsakul said a large collection of sauropod fossils is still waiting to be formally described, and some may be new species. “I’ve always been a dinosaur kid,” he said. The study, in his words, “fulfills a childhood promise of naming a dinosaur.”
Sources
- Giant new dinosaur identified from remains found in Thailand
- Scientists discover giant âlast titanâ dinosaur, Southeast Asiaâs largest ever
