How a villager found Southeast Asia’s largest Dinosaur

A person who lives in a village in Thailand's Chaiyaphum province was walking around in the countryside one day. Found something really big. They saw huge bones sticking out of the ground. This made the people who study bones called paleontologists come and dig up the rest of the bones. They found a dinosaur that nobody knew about before. They named it Nagatitan Chaiyaphumensis. This dinosaur was a plant-eater. It was really long. Almost 90 feet long. It is the dinosaur that has been found in this part of the world.


This new dinosaur is part of the sauropod family. You might know that sauropods are the ones with the necks and tails and big strong legs. Nagatitan chaiyaphumensis lived a time ago, about 113 million years ago. It was really heavy too. Scientists think it weighed as much as five or six big elephants. They figured this out by looking at one of its leg bones, which is almost six feet long.


It took time to dig up all the bones. The people who were digging did not find the head or the teeth. They found a lot of the rest of the skeleton. They found the spine, the ribs and the pelvis. These bones told them that Nagatitan chaiyaphumensis was special because it had "honeycomb" bones. These are bones that have air inside them which makes them lighter but still strong.


A time ago when Nagatitan chaiyaphumensis was alive, Thailand was not like it is today. It was warm and dry. There were not as many trees. There were forests and bushes, though. Nagatitan chaiyaphumensis spent its days eating a lot of plants like ferns and conifers. It did not need to chew its food because it was so big. It just swallowed a lot of plants to get energy.


Nagatitan Chaiyaphumensis was really big so it did not have to worry about being eaten by animals. There were some meat-eaters around but they were not as big as Nagatitan chaiyaphumensis. Even the biggest meat-eater would have been afraid to attack a Nagatitan chaiyaphumensis because it would have gotten hurt.


This discovery is really important because it helps us understand how dinosaurs lived a long time ago. Nagatitan chaiyaphumensis lived during a time when the Earth was getting really hot. Scientists think that this might have helped the sauropods get so big. The name "Nagatitan" comes from a creature in Thai stories that's like a big snake. It is a name for this dinosaur because it is like a big strong creature from stories. This find is also important for Thailand because it means that they have found 14 kinds of dinosaurs now. This is an exciting time for the people who study dinosaurs in Thailand.