Blockbuster of a dinosaur

The great sauropods we think are the biggest land animals ever, like Argentinosaurus, hadn't come on the scene yet when this early Jurassic critter was stomping around South Africa. The article says that, while it was related to sauropods, "...the fossil shows that it evolved earlier, and independently, of sauropods." It weighed about 11.8 metric tons and was named Ledumahadi mafube, or "a giant thunderclap at dawn" in the local Sesotho language.  The fossil is about 200 million years old.
What is most peculiar are the legs: the bones are thicker than those on sauropods and indicate it retained a bit of a crouched, reptile-like posture instead of using the plan known sauropods' bodies did and standing directly over straighter legs.   It was an experiment that, as far as we know at this point, Nature played with for a while and then forgot.