hunter Rubén D. Carolini discovered the tibia (lower leg bone) of a theropod dinosaur while driving a dune buggy in the badlands near Villa El Chocón, in the Neuquén province of Patagonia, Argentina. Specialists from the National University of Comahue were sent to excavate the specimen after being notified of the find. The discovery was announced by the paleontologists Rodolfo Coria and Leonardo Salgado at a Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting in 1994, where science writer Don Lessem offered to fund the excavation, after having been impressed by a photo of the leg-bone. The partial skull was scattered over an area of about 10 m2 (110 sq ft), and the postcranial skeleton was disarticulated. The specimen preserved almost 70% of the skeleton, and included most of the vertebral column, the pectoral and pelvic girdles, the femora, and the left tibia and fibula. In 1995, this specimen (MUCPv-Ch1) was preliminarily described by Coria and Salgado, who made it the holotype of the new genus and species Giganotosaurus carolinii (parts of the skeleton were still encased in plaster at this time). The generic name is derived from the Ancient Greek words gigas/ (meaning "giant"), notos/ (meaning "austral/southern", in reference to its provenance) and -sauros/- (meaning "lizard"). The specific name honors Carolini, the discoverer. The holotype skeleton is now housed in the Ernesto Bachmann Paleontological Museum in Villa El Chocón, which was inaugurated in 1995 at the request of Carolini. The specimen is the main exhibition at the museum, and is placed on the sandy floor of a room devoted to the animal, along with tools used by paleontologists during the excavation. A mounted reconstruction of the skeleton is exhibited in an adjacent room. One of the features of theropod dinosaurs that has attracted most scientific interest is the fact that the group includes the largest terrestrial predators of the Mesozoic Era. This interest began with the discovery of one of the first known dinosaurs, Megalosaurus, named in 1824 for its large size. More than half a century later in 1905, Tyrannosaurus was named, and it remained the largest known theropod dinosaur for 90 years, though other large theropods were also known. The discussion of which theropod was the largest was revived in the 1990s by new discoveries in Africa and South America. In their original description, Coria and Salgado considered Giganotosaurus at least the largest theropod dinosaur from the southern hemisphere, and