Meet Patagotitan, the Biggest Dinosaur Ever Found

In 2013, an old Argentinian shepherd named Aureliano Hernandez found a fossilized bone protruding from a rock at the farm where he worked. The remains of giant dinosaurs festoon Argentina’s landscape, and knowing the strict rules that govern such fossils, the farm’s owners—the Mayo family—contacted local paleontologists. By the time the team arrived, Hernandez had passed away. He never knew that as one of his final acts, he had discovered the largest dinosaur ever known.

The fossil he had found was so big that it took two weeks to unearth it. It was a thigh bone, and the largest ever found—eight feet from end to end. There are photos of paleontologists lying next to it for scale, and they look like bemused pixies, their bodies and imaginations dwarfed by