What is Amphicoelias Fragillimus?
Amphicoelias fragillimus was a sauropod herbivore dinosaur, possibly the largest dinosaur (or animal of any kind) that ever existed. Its veracity is contested because the only bones of the dinosaur, a partial vertebra and a gigantic femur, have since been lost. The vertebra fragment, located by an employee of the American paleontologist Edward Cope in 1877, measured 1.5 m (5 ft) in length. The vertebra it was a part of during the life of the dinosaur would have been 2.7 m (8.8 ft) in length. Extrapolating the length of the vertebra to the total size of the dinosaur, based on similar species, has given an estimated length of 40-60 m (131-196 ft), with a mass of up to 122 tonnes (135 tons), longer than a blue whale but approximately two-thirds its weight. Amphicoelias, which means “doubly-hollow” is a reference to the animal’s thin vertebral walls, which would have been necessary to allow an animal of that size to carry its own skeleton. The second part of the species name, fragillimus,
