It lived in Patagonia almost 100 million years ago and ate 130 kilos of vegetation a day: A cast of one of the largest dinosaurs on earth can be seen in London from Friday, a first in Europe.
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The skeleton of the 37.2-meter-tall animal – a titanosaur named Patagotitan mayorum, the “Titan of Patagonia” – has just entered the exhibition hall of London’s Natural History Museum. If its neck had been raised, the dinosaur would have been the size of a five-story building, researchers say.
The Titanosaur replica resides in the same room in the museum that housed the popular “Dippy,” a famous cast of a Diplodocus, until 2017.
The dismantling of the dinosaur “Dippy”, which has been enthroned in the main hall of the museum since 1979, triggered a wave of grief among museum visitors who had started a “Save Dippy” petition. It had been replaced by the skeleton of a blue whale, christened “Hope” (“Hope” in French).
The new skeleton on display is a replica of one of six titanosaurs, one of Earth’s largest dinosaurs, discovered after an Argentine farmer discovered a giant bone sticking out of the ground in 2010. The excavations lasted until 2015.
“They discovered a graveyard with six different animals in the ground,” Paul Barrett, the exhibition’s scientific director, told AFP. “For about three years, they dug up all these bones and were able to reveal that they had discovered a new species of giant dinosaur, one of the largest animals to ever set foot on the ground.”
The discovered dinosaurs lived in the forests of present-day Patagonia in the Late Cretaceous period, 95 to 100 million years ago.
According to research, these gigantic herbivores could weigh around 57 tons, with huge necks and long tails. They had to eat 130 kilos of plants every day to support themselves.
Scientists estimate that the six animals died at the same time without knowing why.
“We don’t know why they died… They may have been swept away by a flood. Or they were killed by some other environmental problem like a drought,” says Mr Barrett, adding that the research is ongoing.
After the discovery in Argentina, experts 3D scanned each dinosaur to create replicas out of polyester resin and fiberglass, which they then mounted on a steel structure.
It took a Canadian company more than six months to create this giant cast from dozens of fossil bones extracted on site.
The real bones would have been far too heavy to show, but the fact that they are replicas allows visitors to touch the cast.
The replica arrived in London in 32 separate boxes, meaning that “each piece had to be put together like a giant jigsaw puzzle,” said Sinead Marron of the Natural History Museum.
According to her, the exhibition aims to “tell the story of how an animal like this grows from a tiny egg, smaller than a soccer ball, into this amazing giant of 57 tons”.
Games and recreations help bring this story to life. Visitors can touch the teeth of one of the titanosaur’s predators or even enter its internal organs to see how the lungs, heart and intestines work together.