Largest Dinosaur Roamed Oklahoma - Brief Article

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), June, 2000

PALEONTOLOGY

Researchers at the University of Oklahoma, Norman, have analyzed a sauropod that may be the largest creature ever to walk the Earth. Discovered in a remote area of southeastern Oklahoma, the dinosaur is dubbed Sauroposeidon proteles. The name derives from sauros, or lizard, and Poseidon, the Greek god of the sea. Proteles is an allusion to the fact that it is one of the last and most specialized of its kind.

The find consists of neck vertebrae, some nearly five feet long, together with neck ribs almost 12 feet long. That makes Sauroposeidon, with an estimated neck length of about 39 feet, the longest-necked animal ever discovered. Sauroposeidon appears to be a close relative of Brachiosaurus, a giraffe-like dinosaur known from the Jurassic epoch of both the U.S. and Africa.

Brachiosaurus was about 80 feet long and weighed in the neighborhood of 30 tons. By contrast, Sauroposeidon would have been nearly 100 feet long and tipped the scales at more than 50 tons. Brachiosaurs, like giraffes, browsed from the upper parts of trees. Sauroposeidon could have munched branches some 60 feet off the ground, standing flat-footed.

Despite its great size, the neck vertebrae are remarkably slender and light. The bone is no thicker than an eggshell in places and is filled with numerous air pockets separated by thin bony struts. These features make the bones both strong and light. Such a combination of strength and lightness would have been critical to an animal with a neck nearly 40 feet long.

Sauropods were abundant during the Jurassic, but, in North America, they waned in numbers, dying out around 100,000,000 years ago. Sauroposeidon, at about 110,000,000 years old, was one of the last of its kind on this continent. The find is significant because little is known of these last North American sauropods. Most discovered remains are very fragmentary and belong to far smaller dinosaurs. Indeed, the new find may help resolve a long-standing enigma. Gigantic footprints, some measuring more than a yard across, have long been known from similarly aged deposits near Glen Rose, Tex. Sauroposeidon is the first regional dinosaur large enough to have filled those tracks.