If you are the kind of person who ate dinosaur chicken nuggets when you were younger (or still do), devoured oatmeal that had ‘dinosaur eggs’ in it or really liked the movie “The Land Before Time,” then it may interest you to know that a newly discovered dinosaur, weighing in at a massive 26,000 pounds, has taken the cake as the earth’s largest land animal.
That’s right the dinosaur, which CNN reports was unearthed in South Africa back in 2012 by graduate student Blair McPhee, has been named the Ledumahadi mafube, meaning “a giant thunderclap at dawn” in Sesotho, a South African language. What a giant thunderclap it was.
The 13-ton species (equivalent to about two African elephants) was an herbivore and evolved from the sauropod species, existing around 200 million years ago. Characteristics of sauropods include eating plants, walking on all fours and having long necks and tails.
However, L. Mafube differs slightly from the other sauropods because of its massive front legs, which were thicker in comparison, and which led archaeologists to believe that Ledumahadi walked with a “crouched” stance instead of with straightened legs. L. mafube was further identified by Dr. Jennifer Botha-Brink as being an adult, somewhere around 14 years old when it died, according to CNN.
Yet another significant detail about the find is its geographical location. Since a similar species of dinosaur was previously unearthed and identified in Argentina, the discovery of L. Mafube in South Africa provides further scientific evidence of Pangea. And, in the words of the paleontologist Professor Jonah Choiniere, “It shows how easily dinosaurs could have walked from Johannesburg to Buenos Aires at that time.”
Suffice to say, this discovery has been monumental in the study of paleontology. But in reality, outside of textbooks and studies, a dinosaur this massive is pretty difficult to imagine, especially for students on a tiny college campus in upstate New York. And when I posed the question to SLU students, “What would you do if a dinosaur the size of two elephants walked up to you?” many looked at me with utter confusion, and were so dumbfounded, that they just didn’t respond at all (thanks, guys, you were all a big help).
There were, however, two people who did manage to gather responses. Devin Guilfoyle ’19 said that he would be “paralyzed by awe and fear,” and Bennett Hight ’21 said that he would probably, “Stop. Drop. And rolllll out.”
So there you have it: a dinosaur the size of two elephants, the now proclaimed largest animal to ever walk on this earth, a pretty daunting image. Let’s all just hope that “Night at the Museum” has an entirely improbable plot, and that we can just stick to looking at the ‘giant thunderclap at dawn’ in our textbooks.