Enormous dinosaur dubbed Shiva 'The Destroyer' is one of the biggest ever discovered #fossils #paleontology #sauropod #argentina #dinosaurs

An artist's reconstruction of three Bustingorrytitan shiva titanosaurs. (Image credit: Grabriel Diaz Yantén/Paleogdy)

LiveScience has a story about a new dinosaur discovery.  A huge titanosaur, Bustingorrytitan shiva, one of the largest land animals ever, has been found in Argentina.  B. shiva had an estimated weight of 74 tons.  It lived about 90 million years ago during the middle Cretaceous Period.  The animal was described in a paper in the journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica.

The B. shiva discovery in the North Patagonia region of southern South America demonstrates that "megatitanosaurs" with gigantism in excess of 55 tons (50 metric tons) evolved separately within titanosaurs, according to study lead author María Edith Simón, a paleontologist who ran the B. shiva excavation. 

"In Patagonia, we are still at a stage where we are more likely to find something new than something known, and the unknown is often wonderful," Simón told Live Science in an email. "In the publication we reported on a sauropod that became a giant, independently of others within their group."

A farmer named Manuel Bustingorry found the first giant fossil from B. shiva on his land in Neuquén Province in 2000. Simón said she was responsible for the lab and research area at the nearby Ernesto Bachmann Paleontological Museum in the early 2000s and excavated the farm in 2001.