Nice piece of tail: Galeamopus pabsti, the newest sauropod dinosaur in the books. (Credit Davide Bonadonna) The latest big'un of the dinosaur world, Galeamopus pabsti, makes its official debut to science today after hiding in plain sight.
Paleontologists Emanuel Tschopp and Octávio Mateus, authors of the new study, contemplate G. pabsti's noggin in an artsy shot I rather like. (Credit Octávio Mateus) If you want to sum up the sauropods, the group of herbivorous dinosaurs that include the largest land animals ever to stomp across our world, it's easy: little head, long neck, cow-like body and a whip-like tail. Or even more simply, as the exacting Anne Elk once put it, brontosaurus and other sauropods are "thin at one end, much, much thicker in the middle and then thin again at the far end." While those tidy summaries are true, they obscure the curious diversity among sauropods: differences in body ...
