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as long as 4 dogs nose to tail🍌as long as 22 bananas end to end🍉as heavy as 60 watermelons🧸as heavy as 16 kindergarten kids🎒as heavy as 9 school kids🏃could run 100 metres in 9.7 seconds (the fastest human needs 9.6)How big was Meroktenos compared to YOU?
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Fun facts
Meroktenos had a very wide and thick thighbone, a shape that was previously only seen in giant sauropods. Scientists think this helped support its heavy body.1
The name Meroktenos comes from Greek words meaning 'thigh' and 'beast', because its thighbone is so unusual.1
The first fossils of Meroktenos were found in 1959 by a team of geologists and paleontologists near the village of Thabana Morena in Lesotho.1
Meroktenos was originally thought to be a species of Melanorosaurus, but in 2016 scientists gave it its own genus.12
The thighbone of Meroktenos is about 48 centimeters long, which suggests the whole animal was around 4 meters in length.1
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For dino experts
- Scientific name
- Meroktenos
- Named by
- Peyre de Fabrègues and Allain 20164
- Group
- Long-necks
- Family / clade
- Sauropodiformes4
- Classification
- Sauropodomorpha4
- Age of the rocks
- 227 to 201 million years (Norian / Rhaetian)4
- Rock formations
- Elliot4
- Countries
- Lesotho4
- Fossil records
- 1 in the Paleobiology Database4
- Discovery
- In 1959, François Ellenberger, Paul Ellenberger, Jean Fabre and Leonard Ginsburg discovered the first fossils near Thabana Morena, Lesotho. In 1993, François-Xavier Gauffre named it Melanorosaurus thabanensis, but in 2016 Claire Peyre de Fabrègues and Ronan Allain gave it its own genus, Meroktenos.12
- Still debated
- Scientists are not sure why Meroktenos had such a wide thighbone. It was not a giant dinosaur, so the thick bone may have had a different purpose.1
Where the facts come from
- Meroktenos (en.wikipedia.org)
- New material and revision of Melanorosaurus thabanensis , a basal sauropodomorph from the Upper Triassic of Lesotho (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
- Meroktenos thabanensis | Dinosaur Database by DinoAnimals.com (dinoanimals.com)
- Meroktenos in The Paleobiology Database (CC BY 4.0): age, places, rock formations, classification.
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