Giant 122-Foot Dinosaur Goes On Display In New York City

It is so massive, its head sticks out the door of the room, peeking towards the elevators on the 4th floor of the American Museum of Natural History. Officially on display starting today, the enormous titanosaur is an extraordinary display of one of the world’s largest dinosaurs.

 The titanosaur on display is a type of long-necked sauropod dinosaur, so new it has not yet been scientifically named by paleontologists. It was excavated in the Patagonian desert of Argentina by Museo Paleontologico Egidio Feruglio. Paleontologists José Luis Carballido and Diego Pol. Getting the skeleton out of the ground took over a year and work to describe it is still under process.

 According to Forbes,  weight estimates suggest this behemoth likely weighed 70 tons and could be the largest dinosaur that ever lived. It lived in the forests of Patagonia 100 million years ago, and needed to consume hundreds of pounds of vegetation a day just to meet basic caloric requirements. As Chair of Paleontology at AMNH Mark Norell says, “Every time we think we’ve found the biggest dinosaur, we find a bigger one.”

 The dinosaur on display is a cast painstakingly created by the American Museum of Natural History exhibitions staff and will be the centerpiece of the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Orientation Center on the museum’s fourth floor. The actual femur bone of the specimen will be displayed for a limited a time–a whopping 8 feet long, allowing visitors can marvel at its immense size. What is the reason this display skeleton is a cast and not the real thing though? With the massive femur alone weighing almost 1000 pounds, it is easy to understand why the display had to be made of lighter material to allow it to physically stand.

 The titanosaur one of the new paleontology installations at the AMNH in coming months, including the opening of a new exhibit Dinosaurs Among Us on March 21st.

(Forbes)