It’s times like this that I really miss living in New York City. The American Museum of Natural History is one of my favorite places on the planet. Why is that? Because they build GIGANTIC dinosaur models that barely fit in the museum’s halls. Today the AMNH unveiled another must-see exhibit: a cast of a 122-foot-long dinosaur. Meet the titanosaur!
The giant dino cast is so big its 39-foot neck protrudes through the doorway towards the elevator doors. To put its size into perspective – at a total of 122 feet, the titanosaur is 30 feet longer than a blue whale! This species of dinosaur is so new the paleontologists who discovered it haven’t named it yet. All we know is that it belongs to a group known as titanosaurs, and it is one of the largest dinosaurs ever discovered.
Scientists believe this species of titanosaur lived in the forests of today’s Patagonia about 100 to 95 million years ago, during the Late Cretaceous period, and weighed in at a whopping 70 tons! Its massive bones are filled with air pockets, so they are relatively light. It’s the only way a land animal could get so big.
The giant herbivore’s remains were excavated in the Patagonian desert region of Argentina by a team from the Museo Paleontologico Egidio Feruglio led by José Luis Carballido and Diego Pol. According to Scientific American, After 18 months of excavations, the researchers uncovered 223 fossilized bones from six individual titanosaur dinosaurs, including an 8-foot-tall femur, or thighbone. Judging by the image below, it looks like the excavation team was super excited about their discovery.
How on Earth did they make that gigantic cast? The AMNH flew down to Argentina and took 3D scans of all the bones in the field as well as in the lab, so they had the skeleton completely digitized. They used that data to carve bones out of giant slabs of foam. They molded all of the carved elements and cast the bones out of fiber glass. The cast was then painted and mounted. Neat stuff.
If you plan on visiting this incredible exhibit you have a little time. The titanosaur will be on display at the AMNH in New York City until January 2020.