“Unveiling the Colossal Giant: Scientists Uncover the 26,000-Pound Dinosaur That Dominated the Earth!”
“The first thing that struck me about this animal is the incredible robustness of the limb bones,” McPhee said according to Science Daily. “It was of a similar size to the gigantic sauropod dinosaurs, but whereas the arms and legs of those animals are typically quite slender, Ledumahadi‘s are incredibly thick.”
The researchers developed a method of testing to see if this giant dinosaur walked on two legs or four. To do so, they gathered information on leg size and thickness for dinosaurs, animals, and reptiles that walked on either two or four legs.
They then compared that information against the data collected from the Ledumahadi fossil and concluded that the animal walked predominantly on four legs but could have popped up onto two legs to reach things on high branches.
McPhee et al./Current BiologyGraphical abstract showing the evolution of four-legged dinosaur postures.
According to NPR, this evolutionary adaptation allowed the massive dinosaur to possess remarkable stability and may have helped its later descendants like the brontosaurus to grow to massive sizes.
Furthermore, the discovery of the Ledumahadi has also sparked new insights into the geography of prehistoric Earth. Because the Ledumahadi was also related to large dinosaurs that lived around the same time in Argentina, the researchers believe that this supports the theory of the supercontinent Pangea.
“It shows how easily dinosaurs could have walked from Johannesburg to Buenos Aires at that time,” Jonah Choiniere, an author of the study and a paleontology professor at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
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