Meet the Arrudatitan: São Paulo’s very own dinosaur

One morning in 1997, fruit seller Ademir Frare and his 12-year-old nephew Luiz Augusto dos Santos Frare were on one of their regular walks around the rural fields of Cândido Rodrigues, in São Paulo state. The pair had a passion for fossil hunting, so they were left with mouths agape when they came across a bone. Immediately, they began excavating, uncovering vertebrae, ribs, and limb bones, many of them still connected. Giddy with excitement, they called Antônio Celso de Arruda Campos, a paleontology professor in the nearby town of Monte Alto.

The fossils were recovered and taken to the Monte Alto Paleontology Museum, where they were studied by experts who confirmed that, yes, these were dinosaur bones. The prehistoric sauropod was initially given the name Aeolosaurus maximus, as researchers believed it was a relative of the titanosaur Aeolosaurus, remains of which were first encountered in Argentina.

But now, 24 years after its discovery by two amateur fossil hunters, experts from the University of São Paulo (USP) used novel technology to conclude that the bones came from a completely new genus of...