A Single Bone Found in Thailand Has Just Revealed an Entirely New Species of Giant Dinosaur

The popular image of paleontology is a scientist in shorts and a wide-brimmed hat, dramatically uncovering a magnificent, intact skeleton from desert sands.

The reality is that most prehistoric remains are isolated. A tooth here. A phalanx there.

But to a paleontologist, these scattered fragments can tell much larger stories – and from a single vertebra found in a fossil bed in Thailand, researchers have identified a whole new species of giant dinosaur.

Its name is Uragasaurus kalasinensis, and it was a long-necked sauropod – the group of giant plant-eating dinosaurs, including Diplodocus and Brontosaurus – that lived in forests in Southeast Asia just before the Jurassic-Cretaceous transition, which began around 143 million years ago.