Argyrosaurus Pronunciation

Fun Facts

• ✓Argentina itself is named from the Latin word argentum, meaning silver, so Argyrosaurus is literally named silver lizard after a country that named itself after silver, creating a double-silver legacy stretching back to the 16th century.
• ✓Richard Lydekker described Argyrosaurus in 1893 from just a handful of enormous limb bones, yet those fragments alone were enough to reveal one of the largest land animals ever to walk South America.
• ✓The known limb bones of Argyrosaurus are so massive that some early researchers wondered whether the fossils might represent more than one species mixed together, because they seemed almost too large to belong to a single creature.
• ✓Argyrosaurus belongs to the titanosaurs, the same group as Patagotitan mayorum, officially the largest dinosaur ever discovered, showing that Patagonia was the global capital of record-breaking sauropods.
• ✓Paleontologists still debate the true size of Argyrosaurus because the fossils are fragmentary: some estimates put it at 65 feet while others stretch the figure to nearly 100 feet, meaning it could rank among the ten largest dinosaurs ever found.