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  • 7 hours ago
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00:00The very largest of the titanosaurs were titanic, hence the name and the biggest ones were sort of
00:0735 or so meters in length and they were the largest ever living land animals.
00:13Those little ridges are where these little spines hang down underneath the tail of a dinosaur
00:19so that's one of the clues as to why it's from the tail. This shape here where it's dished in
00:26front
00:27and it's got this bulge on the back. This is what tells us it comes from a titanosaur dinosaur because
00:32they're the only titanosaur that have this kind of tailbone and also this bit here is where what we
00:40call the neural spine would come off and it would stick up like that and those neural spines you
00:47can feel them down your back they're a series of lumps that run down the middle of your back
00:51and because this is so far forward and actually is leaning forward like that
00:55that tells us again this is a particular kind of titanosaur dinosaur that have this
00:59this forward leaning neural spine. And we know it belongs to this group because it has a number
01:04of very characteristic features. In particular it has a very deeply concave front end and a ball-like
01:12back end so it had a series of ball and socket joints lining up along its tail and this is
01:18something
01:18that we only see in this group of dinosaurs at this time. Antarctica was very different from the
01:23place that we recognize today. There was no permanent ice cap and although it would have still been cool
01:29in the winter and these animals would have seen some very cold temperatures it was much different
01:34from today. Indeed the whole continent was clothed in a blanket of lush forest so it would have had
01:39huge amounts to eat so rather different and much more hospitable place than we think of today.
01:45Antarctica would certainly have been a route that would have connected the dinosaurs that we see in
01:49Australia, Southern South America, New Zealand today. So at some point in its history it would
01:54have been a very busy place for dinosaurs. So this particular group of dinosaurs lived all the way up
01:59until the end of the Cretaceous period when the asteroid came and wiped out all of the dinosaurs
02:04that we think of as dinosaurs. So the group as a whole survived quite a long time. This particular
02:11dinosaur we're not really sure, we don't know very much about it, it's only a single bone. So we're not
02:15even sure which species it belongs to specifically, we just know the general group. So unfortunately
02:22we don't really know why. But Antarctica remained a very green and pleasant place for millions of
02:27years after dinosaurs became extinct. So other animals and plants were colonizing that area. So it
02:33wasn't the case that the big freeze killed them off.
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