[Joie Chen, Cnn Anchor:] They say that everything out there in Texas is bigger, so it's no surprise that the remains of one of the largest creatures ever to walk around here on this planet Earth were found out there. The fossil bones of the Alamosaurus were discovered in Big Bend National Park in 1996 and have just now been airlifted to the Dallas Museum of Natural History: 10 neck bones were recovered, the largest one weighing 1,000 pounds. You can see them being moved along here. Given that size, it's believed that the animal, which lived about 70 million years ago, must have been about 70 feet long. They grow them big down there. For more on the story, we're joined by Tony Fiorillo, who is curator of earth sciences at the museum down there. Tony, thanks very much for being with us. Talk to us about Alamosaurus: 70 feet long. That seems pretty big. Give us some other information that you know about him.
[Tony Fiorillo, Dallas Museum Of Natural History:] Well, yes. The adult size is about 70 feet long, and we recovered about 23 feet of its neck. And it's a sauropod dinosaur, one of the last of the sauropods. And sauropods are basically the oversized Dino the dinosaur from "The Flintstones."
[Chen:] Ah, Dino.
[Fiorillo:] A good plant eater.
[Chen:] So we're looking at Dino or parts of Dino. Now, have you seen all of this guy?
[Fiorillo:] Well...
[Chen:] Or gal. I guess we won't know, right?
[Fiorillo:] Sorry, I didn't hear that question.
[Chen:] We won't know whether he's a guy or a gal. He's just a big...
[Fiorillo:] That's right. We don't know the sex just yet.
[Chen:] Now, do we know what he looked like in total or we've only seen part of him?
[Fiorillo:] Well, this animal, the original discovery was the hip region of the skeleton, but it was exposed on the surface and badly weathered. So we didn't collect that. But in the digging around that, we recovered the neck. So we've got these 23 feet of neck, and there's every reason to think there's a few more bones out there, and we'll go back and collect them at some later date.
[Chen:] That's a big neck. Tony, we've got questions for you from our live Web chat under way now. This is Lula's question. "Judging from the bones found, how big would the whole dinosaur be?" We've talked about this a little bit, but since you don't have all the pieces, will you ever really know?
[Fiorillo:] How will we ever I missed most of the first part of your question.
[Chen:] I'm sorry. Her question was, given what you've been able to find, do you know how big the whole creature must have been? If you don't find all the pieces, will you every truly know how big this creature was?
[Fiorillo:] Oh, well, what you do is you extrapolate based on some measurements you take with what you do find compared to other animals that are related to it. Obviously, the most exact measurement is going to be if you find the whole animal intact, but we can come up with some pretty reasonable estimates.
[Chen:] And 70 feet long is the estimate at the moment. This is Clarke Bellamy's question: "How long does it take to dig up a dinosaur and restore it?" Great question, Clarke.
[Fiorillo:] This this excavation has taken quite some time. This last stretch was about a 10-day stretch where we were working pretty long shifts, the hardest part of the excavation. We're about 2 12 miles off any road. So we mixed about 1,500 pounds of plaster to coat this thing and all of that had to be carried on our backs out there. And it was an equal amount of water that had to go out there. So we carried 3,000 pounds of supplies out to this site.
[Chen:] One of our chatters was saying perhaps you ought to name this thing the Bushosaurus, because it comes from Texas. How did you seize upon Alamosaurus as his name?
[Fiorillo:] Well, around here, most people get pretty excited hearing the word Alamosaurus, because the make the association to some other place in Texas. But in fact, the animal's named for a trading post in New Mexico where the first couple of bones of this animal were found back in the '30s.
[Chen:] Well, I guess that's you haven't even attempted to rename him Bushosaurus or anything like that, or Dubyaosaurus?
[Fiorillo:] Well, when we open the jackets up, you know, and if it turns out to be a different animal, we'll keep that in mind.
[Chen:] We'll see what his political affiliation might be. Tony's got another question from the live Web chat under way now. Cheri asks: "Who found the dinosaur?"
[Fiorillo:] The dinosaur was originally found when we were excavating a juvenile locality of the same animal. This locality produced the remains of three half-grown Alamosauruses, and one of the students, Dana Biasotti, from the University of Texas, Dallas, needed to go stretch her legs and so she left the quarry, wandered off into the desert, and about an hour later she came back and said she thought she had found something. So we all decided to go stretch our legs and went out, and sure enough she'd found the hips of this Alamosaurus.
[Chen:] I guess everybody needs to stretch their legs more often. Now, let me ask you this: It always seems like things like this are found somewhere way out in Texas or in Montana or someplace like that. I mean, why don't why doesn't anybody discover a dinosaur like in downtown Chicago or someplace like that?
[Fiorillo:] Well, you're right. Most dinosaur bones tend to be found out way out away from every place, but of course, there's a group of dinosaurs called the "duckbill" dinosaurs. And the earliest record of duckbill dinosaurs from North America comes from the Dallas- Ft. Worth Airport.
[Chen:] Tony Fiorillo, the earth sciences
[Fiorillo:] You're welcome. TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com