MessageToEagle.com – The foot that belongs to a brachiosaur, the largest land animal that ever lived on our planet, has been identified and described by an international team of paleontologists.
The fossil was excavated in 1998 by an expedition from the University of Kansas, with Anthony Maltese, lead author of the study, as member of the crew. As he writes, it was immediately apparent that the foot, nearly a meter wide, was from an extremely large animal — so the specimen was nicknamed “Bigfoot.”
It was confirmed that brachiosaurs inhabited a huge area from eastern Utah to northwestern Wyoming, 150 million years ago.
“This is surprising,” says Tschopp, a Swiss paleontologist working at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, “many other sauropod dinosaurs seem to have inhabited smaller areas during that time.”
The animals – the largest land animals that ever lived on this planet – were very closely related to Brachiosaurus, famous for its appearance in the 1993 film Jurassic Park. Like Brontosaurus and Diplodocus, they were plant-eating dinosaurs of the sauropod family with long necks and tails. These giant dinosaurs were
Researchers used 3D scanning and detailed measurements to compare Bigfoot to sauropod feet from numerous species.
According to comparisons with other sauropod feet showed that Bigfoot was clearly the largest dinosaur foot discovered to date.
MessageToEagle.com