A team of Japanese and Mongolian scientists has discovered a skeleton of a giant dinosaur in Gobi Desert in Mongolia, the Japan-based news agency Jiji reports.
The fossil is thought to belong to a 70 million-year-old sauropod dinosaur. Sauropods were long-necked, four-legged plant eaters that inhabited the Earth in the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. This genus includes the largest creatures ever to walk the Earth; in particular, the colossal Argentinosaurus, which scientists believe to have been over 36 meters long and over 21 meters tall.
The dinosaur discovered in Gobi Desert was apparently smaller but still impressive: scientists have found a fossilized 1.55 meter-long thigh bone. They claim that this is one of the largest specimens unearthed in the geological layer from the Late Cretaceous Period in the desert.
The team has also separately discovered fossilized dinosaur footprints left by an ornithopod, a bipedal plant-eating dinosaur. They measured 0.85 meters in length and 1.15 meters in width, which is close to the largest dinosaur foot on record. The "Bigfoot" dinosaur likely was some 17 meters long — 5 meters larger than the famous carnivorous Tyrannosaur rex.
