Artistic impression of Nagatitan chaiyaphumensis
I wrote recently about how and why dinosaurs are such a problem for creationists, which is why some of them resort to the desperate and ludicrously implausible claim that non-avian dinosaurs were contemporaneous with modern humans.
Their problem has now become a little worse with the announcement, in a paper in Scientific Reports, of the discovery of a new species of long-necked, plant-eating dinosaur from Thailand. The study was led by palaeontologists from University College London (UCL), Mahasarakham University, Suranaree University of Technology and Sirindhorn Museum in Thailand. The dinosaur has been named Nagatitan chaiyaphumensis and is described as the largest dinosaur yet found in Southeast Asia. Its fossilised bones were discovered about ten years ago at the edge of a communal pond in Chaiyaphum Province, north-eastern Thailand.
The scale of the animal is impressive. One of its front leg bones, the right humerus, was 1.78 metres long — about the height of an adult human. From the preserved spine, ribs, pelvis and limb bones, the researchers estimate that Nagatitan was about 27 metres long and weighed around 27 tonnes, roughly the same as nine adult Asian elephants.
Nagatitan was a sauropod — one of the long-necked, long-tailed, herbivorous dinosaurs that included animals such as Diplodocus and Brontosaurus. More specifically, it was a somphospondylan titanosauriform, belonging to Euhelopodidae, a clade of sauropods so far known only from Asia. It lived during the Early Cretaceous, about 100–120 million years ago, in what was then a semi-arid landscape crossed by meandering rivers and inhabited by fish, freshwater sharks, crocodile-like reptiles, pterosaurs, smaller herbivorous dinosaurs and large theropod predators.
Somphospondylan sauropods. Somphospondylans were a major branch of the sauropod dinosaurs — the long-necked, long-tailed, four-legged herbivores that included the largest land animals ever to live. More precisely, they were titanosauriform sauropods, closely related to the titanosaurs and more distantly related to the brachiosaurids, such as Brachiosaurus. In the new Nagatitan paper, the authors classify it as: Sauropoda → Titanosauriformes → Somphospondyli → Euhelopodidae.The publication in Scientific Reports is accompanied by a news item from UCL:
The name Somphospondyli means “spongy vertebrae”, referring to the internal structure of their backbone bones. These vertebrae were not solid blocks of bone, but were riddled with small air spaces, known as camellae, giving them a honeycomb-like structure. This was part of the sauropod system of skeletal pneumaticity — air-filled spaces in bones, probably linked to a bird-like air-sac respiratory system — which helped reduce weight without sacrificing too much strength.
This was an important evolutionary innovation. Sauropods were already enormous animals, but their long necks, massive torsos and pillar-like legs imposed severe engineering problems. Lighter, air-filled vertebrae helped make such large bodies mechanically possible. In animals such as Nagatitan, this would have been especially important because even with weight-saving bones, it still reached about 27 metres in length and 25–28 tonnes in mass.
Sauropod gigantism was probably the result of an evolutionary feedback loop. Long necks allowed these animals to feed across a large area without constantly moving their massive bodies, while large bodies allowed larger guts, longer digestion times and better extraction of nutrients from tough vegetation. Increasing size also reduced vulnerability to predators, especially once adults grew beyond the prey range of even large theropods. At the same time, their small lightweight heads, air-filled vertebrae and bird-like respiratory system made neck elongation mechanically and physiologically possible. It was therefore a complex interaction of feeding efficiency, competition, predator pressure and inherited anatomy, rather than a simple arms race with trees.
Somphospondylans first appeared in the Late Jurassic or earliest Cretaceous and survived until the end-Cretaceous extinction, 66 million years ago. They became a diverse, globally distributed group, and by the later Cretaceous the titanosaurian branch of this lineage included the last surviving sauropods.
One Asian branch of the somphospondylans was the Euhelopodidae, the group to which Nagatitan chaiyaphumensis has been assigned. Euhelopodids are especially important because they show that Asia had its own distinctive sauropod history, not merely a few stray representatives of lineages better known from elsewhere. The new Thai fossil adds to that picture by showing that large-bodied euhelopodid sauropods were still present in Southeast Asia during the Early Cretaceous.
‘Last titan’: Southeast Asia’s biggest dinosaur discovered
A new type of long-necked plant-eating dinosaur – the largest ever found in Southeast Asia – has been revealed in a study led by researchers at UCL, Mahasarakham University, Suranaree University of Technology and Sirindhorn Museum in Thailand.
14 May 2026
The dinosaur, described in a new paper in the journal Scientific Reports, was identified from bones found at the edge of a pond in north-eastern Thailand 10 years ago.
Analysing spine, rib, pelvis and leg bones, including a front leg bone 1.78 metres long (as long as a human), the research team estimated that the dinosaur would have weighed 27 tonnes – about the same as nine adult Asian elephants – and measured 27 metres in length.
It has been named Nagatitan chaiyaphumensis, with “Naga” referring to a mythological aquatic serpent in Thai and Southeast Asian folklore, “Titan” referring to the giants of Greek mythology and chaiyaphumensis meaning “from Chaiyaphum”, the Thai province where the fossils were discovered. It is the 14th dinosaur to be named in Thailand.
It belonged to the sauropod family of dinosaurs – long-necked, long-tailed plant-eaters that included the Diplodocus and Brontosaurus – and lived in the Early Cretaceous period between 100 and 120 million years ago.
Our dinosaur is big by most people’s standards – it likely weighed at least 10 tonnes more than Dippy the Diplodocus (Diplodocus carnegii). However, it is still dwarfed by sauropods like Patagotitan (60 tonnes) or Ruyangosaurus (50 tonnes).
Thitiwoot Sethapanichsakul, co-lead author
Department of Earth Sciences
University College London
London, UK.
Thitiwoot Sethapanichsakul, standing next to a leg bone.
We refer to Nagatitan as ‘the last titan’ of Thailand. That is because it was discovered in Thailand’s youngest dinosaur-bearing rock formation. Younger rocks laid down towards the end of the time of the dinosaurs are unlikely to contain dinosaur remains because the region by then had become a shallow sea. So this may be the last or most recent large sauropod we will find in Southeast Asia.
Thitiwoot Sethapanichsakul.
During the Early Cretaceous the environment would have been arid to semi-arid – a preferred habitat for sauropods who appeared to thrive in these environments, relying on the surface area of their long necks and tails to shed heat and regulate their body temperature.
The area where the specimens were found also appeared to be part of a meandering river system, which would have been home to fish, freshwater sharks and crocodiles.
Nagatitan would have lived alongside smaller plant-eating dinosaurs such as iguanodontians and early branching ceratopsians (cousins of the Triceratops), as well as big meat-eaters including carcharodontosaurians and spinosaurids, and flying reptiles called pterosaurs eating fish from the river.
Nagatitan was a somphospondylan sauropod – a subgroup of sauropod that became widespread about 120 million years ago. The authors found that it specifically belonged to a narrower group within the somphospondylans called Euhelopodidae, which represents a group of somphospondylan sauropods only found in Asia.
Nagatitan is distinct from other species due to a combination of unique features on its spine, pelvis and legs. A life-size reconstruction of the dinosaur is on display at the Thainosaur Museum at Asiatique in Bangkok.
A team of five academics work on different aspects of dinosaur evolution at UCL, with strong collaborative links to the Natural History Museum. The extended research group comprises four research fellows and postdoc researchers, and more than 10 PhD students. At least four of the PhD students are working on dinosaur evolution, with the others looking at a wider array of other evolutionary questions relating to vertebrates, including crocodiles and birds.My dream is to continue pushing to get Southeast Asian dinosaurs recognised internationally. More international collaborations between Thailand and other institutions like UCL can further our understanding of the region’s palaeobiology and apply it to a global context. This all starts with identifying and describing the specimens we have found first. We have a large collection of sauropod fossils that have not yet been formally described - these may include a number of new species.
I’ve always been a dinosaur kid. This study doesn’t just establish a new species but also fulfils a childhood promise of naming a dinosaur.
Thitiwoot Sethapanichsakul.This discovery comes out of a new collaboration between UCL and colleagues in Thailand. The material was studied both in Thailand and at UCL - 3D scanning and printing has meant that we can study the specimen and collect data without having to travel (good for reducing carbon footprint). We have had a long-standing interest in the evolution of these gigantic plant eaters and have good collaborative links with researchers around the world. It is great to work with Thai colleagues and start to get insights into what was happening in Southeast Asia during the Jurassic and Cretaceous.
Professor Paul Upchurch, co-author
Department of Earth Sciences
University College London
London, UK.
Although Thailand is a small country within Asia, we have a very high diversity in dinosaur fossils, possibly the third most abundant in Asia in terms of dinosaur remains. We’ve only really been studying dinosaurs in Thailand about 40 years (since the first dinosaur was named in 1986), and already we have a surge of younger generation palaeontologists, who are actively undertaking research and promoting palaeontology and its importance within the country.
Dr Sita Manitkoon, corresponding author
Palaeontological Research and Education Centre
Mahasarakham University
Khamriang
Maha Sarakham, Thailand.
Publication:
What Nagatitan chaiyaphumensis gives us, then, is not merely another spectacular dinosaur, nor simply another reminder that these animals lived tens of millions of years before anything resembling modern humans existed. It is another piece of a much larger and highly coherent scientific picture: fossils preserved in datable rocks, anatomical features that place the animal within a known evolutionary hierarchy, and biogeographical evidence showing how different sauropod lineages diversified across ancient Asia.
For creationists that is the real difficulty. Nagatitan does not appear as an isolated curiosity, as though dropped fully formed into the fossil record without relatives, history or context. It fits neatly into a nested pattern: sauropod, titanosauriform, somphospondylan, euhelopodid. Its bones show the same mixture of shared inherited features and distinctive specialisations that evolutionary theory predicts. Its age, anatomy and geography all make sense as part of the long evolutionary history of sauropods in Asia.
That is how science works. A few bones found at the edge of a pond in north-eastern Thailand can be compared with fossils from elsewhere, placed in a phylogenetic framework, dated by their geological context, and used to refine our understanding of dinosaur evolution. No magic, no special creation, no desperate need to squeeze 100 million years of Earth history into a few thousand years of mythology — just evidence, comparison, testable interpretation and the willingness to revise conclusions when new discoveries are made.
And once again, the evidence points in exactly the wrong direction for creationism. Instead of a jumble of unrelated animals created during a single mythical week, the fossil record gives us lineages, transitions, branching relationships and deep time. Nagatitan, the “last titan” of Southeast Asia, is therefore not just a giant dinosaur. It is another giant problem for anyone still trying to pretend that the history of life can be explained without evolution.
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