Among the biggest ever
It may have weighed as much as twelve elephants.
The plant-eaters · Long-necked plant-eaters
Argentinosaurus
Argentine lizard · AR-jen-TEEN-oh-SORE-us
A colossal long-neck: one of the largest animals ever to walk on land.
- Size
- Perhaps 30 to 35m long; 60 to 80 tonnes
- Lived
- About 96 to 92 million years ago
- Found in
- Patagonia, Argentina
Plods after you, shaking the ground. Move your pointer and see.
To scale
How big was it?
The bars are drawn to the same scale. On these pages the animals are sized in proportion to each other as far as a screen allows: the giants are shrunk a little and the smallest are enlarged, so that you can see them all.
Good to know
Six things about the argentinosaurus
A backbone taller than a person
A single bone from its back is about 1.6 metres tall.
A farmer found it
A rancher came across a leg bone in 1987 and at first took it for a fossil tree trunk.
From an egg the size of a football
It hatched weighing about five kilograms and grew to more than ten thousand times that.
Known from a few bones
Only some backbones, ribs and leg bones have been found. Its size is an estimate.
A slow walker
Computer models suggest it walked at about five miles an hour.
The real thing
Photos of the argentinosaurus
Photos are from Wikimedia Commons, used under the free licences shown. They have been resized, and cropped where they appear in link previews.
What it ate
Enormous quantities of leaves from conifers and other trees.
How we know
The size is worked out by comparing its few bones with more complete relatives.
Keep going
More from The plant-eaters
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