Scientists say they’ve identified the largest long-necked, herbivorous dinosaur to ever live in Southeast Asia, and it could be the last remains of this species they will ever find, according to a new study.
Thitiwoot (Perth) Sethapanicsakul, a Ph.D. student at the University College London Earth Sciences and the lead author of the study, is calling it “the last titan” of Thailand.
“We won’t find any more dinosaur fossils in any younger rocks in Thailand, making this dinosaur kind of the last giant of its kind that we could possibly find in the region,” Sethapanichsakul told ABC News.
The dinosaur’s scientific name is Nagatitan chaiyaphumensis.
Locals in the Chaiyaphum province of northeastern Thailand were the first to discover the dinosaur’s fossils in 2016. Embedded in a rock formation along the side of a pond, the region’s Department of Mineral Resources excavated 10 bones, including a front leg bone estimated to be nearly 60-p feet.
Excavation teams continued digging for evidence until they ran out of funding in 2020, according to Sethapanichsakul. After receiving a grant from the National Geographic Society in 2023, he joined forces with a team of researchers and together they stepped in to complete the study.
From the remains, scientists found they had unearthed something larger than any previous dinosaur species documented in Southeast Asia — a massive dinosaur estimated to have weighed approximately 27 tons when it roamed the Earth.
That’s more than twice the size of the world’s largest living land mammal, the African elephant.
Sethapanicsakul says the discovery was more than the announcement of a new dinosaur; it created an opportunity to reignite interest in paleontology in Thailand, which only entered the world of paleontology in 1986.