Based in Westbury, NY, Valerie Varnuska enjoys exploring the outdoors and the natural world in her free time. Among Valerie Varnuska’s long-standing interests is paleontology, which focuses on aspects of the planet’s past revealed through bones and the fossil record.
In early 2021, paleontologists in Argentina’s Neuquen Province discovered a set of bones of such enormous size that researchers believe that they may belong to the largest land animal that ever existed. As reported in Cretaceous Research, the remote site in Patagonia yielded the remains of Sauropods, a type of dinosaur characterized by their small legs and heads and elongated necks and tails. Among the most well known of the Sauropods are brontosauruses and brachiosauruses.
This new find was of titanosaurs, which are thought to have survived up to 66 million years ago, when a large asteroid hit the planet. This led to the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, during which a majority of life on Earth was extinguished. Because the fossil record is not complete, it cannot be said definitively that the titanosaur exceeds the size of its nearest competitor, the patagotitan. That said, the vertebrae and pelvic bones are substantially different from patagotitan, leading scientists to suspect that it is a new species.
Valerie Varnuska 