Dreadnoughtus - huge, but not the 'hugest'

Massive props to the authors of the Dreadnoughtus papers, this has to be one of the best documented and figured sauropods of all time, and in quite a short span of time (the specimen was just named four years ago!).

Of course what everyone wants to discuss is the size of Dreadnoughtus. The mass has been downsized a few times since the initial description's claim of 59 tonnes; I don't have anything new to add other than what has been said previously (i.e. it wasn't as big as Argentinosaurus, Patagotitan, the Mexico "Alamosaurus" or Puertasaurus).

Length-wise I get 23 meters along the curve of the back, a bit shorter than the 26 meters in the original paper. Most of that is due to my interpreting a large cervical as the 10th rather than the 9th cervical. Doing so has a knock-on effect that shortens the estimate for most of the cervical vertebrae. It's still got a heck of a long neck, even for a titanosaur. I'd be remiss not to point out that there's no way to tell which position is correct at this point - we will need more Dreadnoughtus cervicals to know for certain, but in the absence of any additional data I'm going with the more conservative interpretation.