DREADNOUGHTUS THE VEGETARIAN TITANOSAUR

If you haven't read about the beyond-giant-ass herbivore dinosaur find announced yesterday in Scientific Reports, you need to get with the program. Right now. If the name isn't enough to interest you (which, come on, IT SHOULD BE), these pictures and illustrations might help.

This is just the tip of the tail.

That's a humerus/upper arm bone.

#1 draft choice in prehistoric football.

In life, Dreadnoughtus would have been about 86 feet (26 meters) long and weigh nearly 60 tons, heavier than a Chieftan tank, Drexel University paleontologist Ken Lacovara and colleagues calculate. That's so big, the scientists write, that adults of the species would have been "nearly impervious to attack" by predators that stalked the same floodplains between 84 million and 66 million years ago.

Among the largest of dinosaurs, titanosaurs like Dreadnoughtus were hefty herbivores with tiny heads, long necks, and tapering tails. This body type marks titanosaurs as part of a group called sauropods, to which classic dinosaurs such as Apatosaurus also belonged. Sauropods spent their days feeding high and low, plucking greens from patches of ferns and trees alike, as they browsed the prehistoric salad bar.

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