Biggest dinosaur could walk but not run or tackle hills Argentinosaurus is so large that it's skeleton fills an entire room at the Museo Municipal Carmen Funes in Argentina (Dr. Bill Sellers, The University of Manchester) The dinosaur, which roamed South America around 97 million years ago during the Cretaceous period, is thought to be the largest land animal to have ever lived. Dr Bill Sellers, who led the research at the University of Manchester's faculty of life sciences, said: "Everyone tends to think about these things as being like much larger examples of modern animals like elephants, but they were not. They were very specialised and lived in a very different environment to what exists now. This animal certainly did not need to live in the water as they were perfectly capable of supporting their weight on land and perfectly adequate locomotion. We could only get locomotion for this huge animal to work by making a lot of compromises. It would have found anything a bit out of the ordinary - like steep terrain - very difficult. If it ever found itself on the ground, then getting up again would have been extremely slow and laborious as it really didn't have the spare power in the muscles. How it managed to mate is a very interesting question. It certainly didn't run but it probably didn't have to as it was vastly bigger than any of the large predators around.  Dr Sellers and his colleagues used a three dimensional scanner to obtain a digital reconstruction of an Argentinosaurus huinculensis at the Museo Municipal Carmen Funes in Argentina. The dinosaur is named after the country in which it was first found in 1993 by palaeontologists Jose Bonaparte and Rodolfo Coria. Dr Coria worked with Dr Sellers and his team to help reconstruct how the creature would have moved. Their findings are published in the journal PLOS ONE. A digital reconstruction of the Argentinosaurus skeleton (PLOS ONE) Using a computer with the power equivalent to 30,000 desktop computers, they reconstructed how its muscles and joints would have worked. The computer then spent a week running simulations to examine how the animal would have moved. They estimate that a single stride by Argentinosaurus would have been around 12 feet long. They now hope to conduct similar research on other dinosaurs such as Triceratops and Tyrannosaurus rex. Dr Sellers added: "What we really want to do is to create a virtual Cretaceous where we have all the animals moving around. The goal ultimately is to have the simulations where we can study predator prey interactions so we can see the giant carnivores chase down giant herbivores. One of the areas where we still have a great deal of uncertainty is how their muscles worked as these are not fossilised. We need to examine modern animals in new ways to get a better understanding of this.