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LONG-NECKED DINOSAURS WERE the largest animals that ever walked on land. Moving cathedrals of sinew and bone, these plant-eating giants—called sauropods—could stretch up to 120 feet from head to tail. At their heaviest, they weighed a staggering 70 tons. But a new study published today in Nature Communications takes a whack at sauropods' conventional origin story. A new Chinese species of sauropod named Lingwulong shenqi—the “amazing dragon of Lingwu”—directly implies that major groups of Earth's largest land animals arose some 15 million years earlier than previously thought.

An artist's depiction of Caihong juji, a species of theropod dinosaur that lived 160 million years ago in what's now northeastern China. ILLUSTRATION BY VELIZAR SIMEONOVSKI, THE FIELD MUSEUM. A new dinosaur discovered in China had feathers that may have glittered with the colors of the rainbow. Based on its stunningly preserved remains, scientists say the dinosaur’s head and chest seem to have been covered with iridescent feathers akin to those on modern hummingbirds.

An artist's reconstruction of the new titanosaurian dinosaur Mansourasaurus shahinae on a coastline in what is now the Western Desert of Egypt approximately 80 million years ago. (Andrew McAfee/Carnegie Museum of Natural History) Paleontologist Matthew Lamanna can still remember the day in 2014 when a colleague, Hesham Sallam, emailed him detailed pictures of fossils that had just been unearthed by his team in Egypt. From one photo, depicting the remains of a large lower jaw bone, Lamanna knew right away that Sallam had found a dinosaur.