It’s vastly easier to be big in water than on the ground as a result of the square–cube law. Indeed it kind of boggles the mind how these gigantic dinosaurs were even able to stand, much less move around.
Sauropods were light for their size, the air sacs definitely did a lot of work, though so did much of the size being neck and tail.
Argentinosaurus is estimated to have reached 35 metres and 80 tonnes at the upper range, for comparison blue whales top out at 30 meters and 200 tonnes.
You can see something similar with giraffes, though without the benefit of tail (or air sacs). Male giraffes average above 5m tall (tallest known was 5.8m — 19ft) compared to a bush elephant's 3.2 (4 at the absolute limit), but the average male giraffe is just 1200kg versus 6000 for elephants.
Obviously Sauropods were still bonkers heavy, to a ridiculous degree for land animals.
Yes, I’m surprised that in a time those creatures existed on land something much larger didn’t existed at sea. My rudimentary knowledge of the past was that dinosaurs weren’t some anomaly, everything was large back then.
Yet. Our current reality is the largest land animal is oversized by 30x by the blue whale.
