Presenter:
Matthew C. Lamanna, PhD
Mary R. Dawson Associate Curator, Section of Vertebrate Paleontology
Carnegie Museum of Natural History

Awakening the Titans: Discovering Giant New Dinosaurs in the Southern Continents

Near the end of the Mesozoic Era, at the same time that T. rex, Triceratops, and their relatives dominated North America and Asia, very different kinds of dinosaurs ruled the Southern Hemisphere landmasses. The most diverse and abundant of these were the titanosaurs — long-necked, plant-eating sauropods that ranged from the size of a cow to the size of a humpback whale or more. Although well over 70 titanosaurian species have been discovered to date, many aspects of the biology of these animals remain mysterious due to a scarcity of relatively complete, well-preserved fossils.

Dr. Matthew Lamanna and collaborators have spent the past two decades searching for titanosaur fossils throughout the southern continents, from Argentine Patagonia to the Egyptian Sahara, from the Australian Outback to the frozen wastes of Antarctica. Foremost among their discoveries are a Patagonian behemoth that is the most complete giant titanosaur ever discovered, and a recently named Egyptian species that fills a 30 million-year gap in the dinosaurian fossil record of the African continent. Collectively, these discoveries cast critical new light on the anatomy, evolutionary history, and body dimensions of the most massive land animals that have ever existed.

Dr. Lamanna is the Mary R. Dawson Associate Curator and Head of Vertebrate Paleontology and the principal dinosaur researcher at Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Within the past two decades, he has directed or co-directed field expeditions to Antarctica, Argentina, Australia, China, Croatia, Egypt, and Greenland that have resulted in the discovery of multiple new species of dinosaurs and other Cretaceous-aged animals. Dr. Lamanna served as chief scientific advisor to Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s exhibition Dinosaurs in Their Time, and has appeared on television programs for PBS, Discovery Channel, History Channel, A&E, Science Channel, and more.