Dino-mite discoveries. (Life News).

* If you thought Jurassic Park III was awesome, get a load of two recent dino finds that have scientists screaming--for joy, that is.

Jumbo Was Here

A beast as big as 15 jumbo elephants? That's right: Paralititan stromeri may have been the second largest dinosaur ever to roam Earth. Its fossilized remains were dug up last year by a team of paleontologists (fossil scientists) led by grad student Joshua Smith of the University of Pennsylvania.

Smith's dig at the Bahariya Oasis in Egypt's Sahara Desert reaped a giant trove of animal and plant fossils. The biggest find: a 170 centimeter (67 inch)-long humerus (upper arm bone). "Certain bones in a vertebrate [back-boned animal] provide a good index for overall body size," Smith says. Pieced together with the animal's other remains, Smith estimates the big humerus belonged to a 94-million-year-old, 70 ton, 30.5 meter (100 foot)-long dino--second in heft only to the Argentinosaurus, which weighed 100 tons. "It would have been a very stocky, football-player kind of dinosaur," he says.

Gigantic? Yes. Fierce? Probably not, judging by its closest relatives, the sauropods--a group of huge, plant-eating dinos. Sauropods were ungainly, clawless, and lacked meat-ripping teeth. "It's like a giant cow," says Smith. "You can't imagine it running around hunting stuff."

Fossilized fish, turtles, and plants also found near the vegetarian dino indicate the now bone-dry Sahara was once tropical and coastal--perhaps as lush as the Florida Everglades during the Cretaceous period, 144 to 65 million years ago.

Meet Fluffy

On the other side of the globe, farmers tilling land in northeastern China's Liaoning Province last spring unearthed one strange sight: a 130-million-year-old dino skeleton entombed in rock that shows a big fluffy head and feathery body like a long-tailed duck. "If you could transport yourself back in time and see these things running around, you'd probably think `what weird-looking birds!'" says paleontologist Mark Norell at, New York's American Museum of Natural History.

While this isn't the first feathered dino fossil on record, "it's the first one in which we can clearly see where and how the entire body was covered with feathers," Norell says. It belonged to a type of dino called a dromaeosaur: a small, fast-running theropod--a group of two-legged meat eaters, or carnivores, that included T. rex.

While scientists continue to debate whether birds evolved from theropods, most studies confirm that birds and dinos share more than 100 anatomical features, including swiveling wrists, wishbone, and three forward-pointing toes. Since nonflying dromaeosaurs existed before birds, Norell considers this specimen the best evidence so far that animals developed feathers to keep warm before they ever used them to fly.

This fall the feathery dino will undergo a CAT scan (3-D cross-sectional X-ray). "That will let us study the part of the skeleton buried in the rock," says Norell. Stay tuned for a "Fluffy" update.