Big honkin' dinosaurs

A nearly-complete skeleton of a titanosaur was found in Argentina (not the first time I've posted an article about this dinosaur, by the way). Apparently the only important thing missing is the head and neck, but the feet were completely intact, which is unusual.

The thing with fossils is that it's so unlikely that a single organism will be preserved that way, that the massive amount of fossils out there speaks to the magnitude of living creatures throughout history. The animal (or plant) has to be in the right place at the right time: someplace without a lot of erosion, where sediment can cover the body before it decays completely. Swamps or bodies of water are good, deserts and mountains are terrible -- meaning the terrain when the animal died, of course, which is generally quite different now. And then, assuming the body is covered quickly and the sediment it's in turns to rock, there's a chance it might be fossilized, but for the fossil to survive until somebody can find it today it might be subjected to all sorts of heat and pressure and erosion, like any other rock.

On the face of it, I'm amazed we can find anything, but some fossils, like some pollens or plankton, are so common that you're guaranteed to find a whole mess of them if you crack open a sedimentary rock of a certain age; they're even used as a method of dating rocks, sometimes very precisely. The oil industry, of all people, is a major supporter of this branch of paleontology (called biostratigraphy) because oil only forms in very specific conditions over a certain period of time. They need to know how old the rocks are, and the fossils tell them.

So anyway, that's one of the reasons I find news like this so interesting.