Pronunciation: BRE-vee-pah-RO-puss
Meaning: Short-spaced feet
Author/s: Dutuit and Ouazzou (1980)
Synonyms: None known
First Discovery: Azilal, Morocco
Discovery Chart Position: #
Breviparopus taghbaloutensis
There are many contenders for the title of biggest ever dinosaur, such as Bruthiakosaurus and Amphicoelias, and even some that are based on bona fide fossils, such as Argentinosaurus, Alamosaurus, and the new giant "Attenborough" titanosaur that has yet to be named so will be discounted for now. But there is another, not-much-talked-about critter that had also been eating the breakfast of champions, and that's Breviparopus. Okay, Breviparopus isn't a dinosaur, it's an ichnotaxon, based solely on an artifact that a dinosaur left behind, in this case, a 90-meter-long track of fossilised footprints in Morocco's Atlas mountains, and they're huge.
Based on footprints around a meter wide when taking backfill into account, even modest estimations have pitched the monster that made them somewhere between 34 and 37 meters in length and around 68-72 tons in weight. And these proportions are based on the fact its gait is not particularly wide and the prints preserve a ground-level hallux (inner or "big toe") claw impression, suggesting it's probably a Brachiosaurus relative, which mostly max-out way before the 25-meter mark. But do these tracks make their owner the biggest dinosaur ever discovered?
Well, "it" would appear to be much larger than the biggest known brachiosaur Brachiosaurus and somphospondyl Sauroposeidon, and a tad longer than the legendary titanosaur Argentinosaurus. But here's some food for thought; compared to Breviparopus some footprints from Broome (Australia) and Plagne (France) are half as wide again which suggests the mind-blowing estimated stats in the range of the dinosaur once known as "Amphicoelias fragillimus" (58 meters long and 100+ tons in weight) and Bruhathkayosaurus (if it is actually a dinosaur and not a bunch of fossilised tree trunks) are more than just pie in the sky.
All things considered, we're fairly confident that if fossils turned up tomorrow that could be linked to Breviparopus (remember that name belongs to the tracks, the trackmaker would need a name of its own) "it" would be in the top half-dozen longest and heaviest dinosaurs that we have evidence for thus far. And if it was a brachiosaur, the sauropods renowned for being high at the shoulder with an almost vertically-oriented neck, it might just be the tallest dinosaur too.
Apparently, Breviparopus prints are much different to the tracks made in their homeland of Morocco by Atlasaurus imelakei. However, there is another suspect; the waiting-for-its-own name "Brachiosaurus" nougaredi, discovered not far from Morocco, that has a ginormous but unusually narrow sacrum, even by brachiosaur standards, indicating it too had a narrow gait. Just sayin'.
Based on footprints around a meter wide when taking backfill into account, even modest estimations have pitched the monster that made them somewhere between 34 and 37 meters in length and around 68-72 tons in weight. And these proportions are based on the fact its gait is not particularly wide and the prints preserve a ground-level hallux (inner or "big toe") claw impression, suggesting it's probably a Brachiosaurus relative, which mostly max-out way before the 25-meter mark. But do these tracks make their owner the biggest dinosaur ever discovered?
Well, "it" would appear to be much larger than the biggest known brachiosaur Brachiosaurus and somphospondyl Sauroposeidon, and a tad longer than the legendary titanosaur Argentinosaurus. But here's some food for thought; compared to Breviparopus some footprints from Broome (Australia) and Plagne (France) are half as wide again which suggests the mind-blowing estimated stats in the range of the dinosaur once known as "Amphicoelias fragillimus" (58 meters long and 100+ tons in weight) and Bruhathkayosaurus (if it is actually a dinosaur and not a bunch of fossilised tree trunks) are more than just pie in the sky.
All things considered, we're fairly confident that if fossils turned up tomorrow that could be linked to Breviparopus (remember that name belongs to the tracks, the trackmaker would need a name of its own) "it" would be in the top half-dozen longest and heaviest dinosaurs that we have evidence for thus far. And if it was a brachiosaur, the sauropods renowned for being high at the shoulder with an almost vertically-oriented neck, it might just be the tallest dinosaur too.
Apparently, Breviparopus prints are much different to the tracks made in their homeland of Morocco by Atlasaurus imelakei. However, there is another suspect; the waiting-for-its-own name "Brachiosaurus" nougaredi, discovered not far from Morocco, that has a ginormous but unusually narrow sacrum, even by brachiosaur standards, indicating it too had a narrow gait. Just sayin'.
(Short-spaced feet? from Taghbalout)Etymology
Breviparopus is derived from the Greek "brevi" (short), "para" (near, beside, or possibly, in this case, more like side-by-side) and "pous" (foot). We're stabbing in the dark as the paper in which the name was coined is elusive, but we're guessing this is a play on the short space between its feet.
The species epithet, taghbaloutensis, means "from taghbalout" in Latin.
Discovery
The remains of Breviparopus were discovered in the Iouaridène Formation, 4Am, Taghbalout, Azilal, Morocco, by Jean-Michel Dutuit, in 1979.
