Comment on Paleo-King's profile

Those are impressive sizes. Though I suspect they may be a bit conservative, as it's unlikely that an adult Sauroposeidon had the same proportions as Paluxysaurus (though the juvenile Cloverly Sauroposeidons apparently did). I would expect more elongation in the neck and tail for the "adult", and the four cervicals we have were likely not the longest ones in the neck. Similarly, the French monster would likely top those estimates based on likely neck elongation assuming its juvenile form was something like the juvenile Sauroposeidons from Cloverly.

I would estimate Sauroposeidon somewhere around 28-30m, and the two French Monsters known from femurs at around 33m and 36m respectively. And there is a huge rib pictured on one of those French websites that's AT LEAST as long as 4 people! www.bulbintown.com/projects/le… Am I seeing this right? This would have to be some kind of record breaker, even bigger than the larger femur specimen.

This is great news. Now we have a basal somphospondyl to rival Argentinosaurus. 33.5m and 85 tonnes (?!?) for a chubutisaur is no joke.

And that crazy-huge rib... that thing must be 6m long? Even when uncrushed and in its natural curve, that's at least a 4m-deep rib cage. I know there are a lot of issues with scaling sauropods off of just rib pieces, but keep in mind, this rib looks to be 6m long and is still missing the bottom end! So conservatively at 4m uncrushed and articulated, what does that come out to, a 112 foot or 36m animal using my B. alithorax as a model (it has a similarly long torso), but the neck would be a lot longer in Sauroposeidon or the French Monster...

... so using Steve O'Connor's Paluxysaurus skeletal is a better model (more elongated neck plus proportionally shallower ribcage), then we have a total length/longest rib length ratio of 10.24, so we get a 41m animal! This means it's about 1.22 times the length of Franoys' estimate for the larger femur specimen (remember, that's still a conservative estimate). Cubing that for all 3 dimensions, we get 1.81 times the volume of that specimen, and thus 1.51 times the mass.  = 154 tonnes. THIS IS INSANE!

Folks, we may have the biggest dinosaur ever here. I'm not claiming it "must" be 154 tonnes, it may not be much more than 100-110 tonnes depending on how these animals grew allometrically. But that's still in Puertasaurus/Mexican Alamosaurus/biggest individual of Chubut Monster territory. And the 41m length exceeds all of these animals, and is still only based on using the Paluxysaurus skeletal as a model, still ignoring how much distal material is missing from the rib, and still scaling up from Franoys' conservative estimate for the larger French Monster Femur. With better photos we may be able to bring down the size, but for now... WOW. 41m and possibly in excess of McNeill Alexander's (flawed) "upper limit" for sauropod masses. I'm not joking, this could be the find of the century

At least one of these French Monsters is a real record crusher, probably the individual with that huge rib (assuming it's not a petrified tree, which is unlikely given all the attention it's getting from the dig team in that photo, plus its apparently rib-like proximal end and close proximity to an obvious distal rib fragment next door).