The Gasp Menagerie – Dread Central Gets Its Mascot Dinosaur
Mr. Dark
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Some archaeologists out there are looking out for us, as they’ve discovered and named what simply must become our mascot dinosaur.
The largest complete dinosaur ever found, the Dreadnoughtus schrani is known as “Dread” for short. The name literally means “fear nothing” because this sucker had zero predators. Why? How, precisely, do you attack and kill something that weighs sixty-five tons? The thing was the size of SEVEN T-Rexes or about a DOZEN elephants.
At 85 feet long, the Dread was a titanosaur, a special category of massive megalizards reserved for the truly immense of the fossilized set. It lived around 77 million years ago down in Patagonia at the southern tip of Argentina.
Per Discovery News there could be larger creatures out there to be found, but they can’t find a skeleton complete enough to estimate the size. Dread died quickly in a riverbed so the two samples they’ve found are both complete.
This critter was so massive that they estimate it just stood in one place and moved its neck around to eat all the vegetation it could reach before moving on to the next spot. They describe its tail as “weaponized” due to the sheer scope of it, thus making it fear absolutely nothing.
Knowing that advanced life forms of this size once roamed the earth, is it a big stretch to imagine creatures of similar size we haven’t discovered? Giant squid were considered a myth until we caught one, and then thought possibly extinct until we captured one on video, alive and terrifying. Is the deep sea version of Dread roving around the unvisited depths, waiting for us to find it? Is a creature like Dread the basis for the legends of Mokele-Mbembe in Africa?
Categorized:News
