• The dinosaur has yet to be officially named, but is informally known as ‘Titanosaur’
  • Titanosaur stands 20 feet tall, and is 122 feet long, weighing 70 tons in life
  • This is first fairly complete skeleton found of the newly discovered species
  • Researchers dug up the bones in a desert region of Argentine Patagonia

    • The biggest dinosaur ever to be shown at the American Museum of Natural History will be unveiled on Friday, and its head will graze the ceiling. Known as the Titanosaur, it is one of the largest dinosaurs ever discovered, and lived 100 million years ago.

        

    The biggest dinosaur ever to be shown at the American Museum of Natural History will be unveiled on Friday, and it is so big, it’s head will graze the ceiling and poke out through it’s exhibition hall.

    Known as the Titanosaur, it is one of the largest dinosaurs ever discovered, and lived 100 million years ago.

    Researchers dug up the bones in a desert region of Argentine Patagonia, after a farmer found what he suspected to be fossils.

    The 122-foot-long dinosaur stands 20 feet tall and likely weighed 70 tons, according to the Wall Street Journal, about the same as 10 African elephants.

    Its thigh bone is nearly 8 feet long.

    ‘Everything was extremely large,’ Diego Pol, one of the palaeontologists involved in the 2014 excavation, told WSJ.

    The Titanosaur is so large that it will not fit into one room in the American Museum of Natural History; its head will reach the ceiling, poking out of the gallery and into the hall along with part of the neck.

    At first, the researchers from Museo Paleontológico Egidio Feruglio didn’t realize just how big a discovery had been made.

    ‘After a few days working, we realized it was huge,’ Pol said.

    ‘Sometimes there’s a piece that doesn’t lead to anything, and sometimes you are lucky and find a fantastic set of bones.’

    José Luis Carballido, another member of the team, agreed.

    ‘The first visit was exciting when we discovered the femur,’ Carballido told WSJ, ‘but it was the second or third visit that we really knew the importance of the discovery.’

    The researchers dug up 223 fossils from the site, revealing a species that has just recently been discovered.

    ‘It is the first time we have a fairly complete skeleton of the giant titanosaurus,’ Pol told AFP. Before, experts had just a few bones.

    It has yet to be officially named, but is being called ‘Titanosaur’ in the meantime, referring to a group of similar dinosaurs.

    ‘These are your classic long-necked, long-tailed, really big dinosaurs,’ Don Phillips, president of the New York Paleontological Society and lecturer at NYU told WSJ.

    ‘They are the largest land animals that ever lived.’

    At first, the researchers from Museo Paleontológico Egidio Feruglio didn’t realize just how big a discovery had been made. It was days later that the excavation revealed a never-before-seen species.

        

    Despite their intimidating stature, researchers think that these giant dinosaurs were herbivores, eating only plants.

    ‘They were probably not much of a threat if you lived back then,’ Phillips said, ‘unless you got stepped on by one.’

    The species lived in the forests of modern-day Patagonia 100 to 95 million years ago, during the Late Cretaceous period, according to AFP.

    This specimen is of a young adult, of unknown sex.

    Experts say that young herding animals can become isolated from their group and die of stress and hunger, often near water resources.

    The paper now awaits publishing, and once accepted, the official name will be established and recorded.

    To build the display, the bones were recreated through plaster casts and 3-D printing.

    Scientists from the Museo Paleontológico Egidio Feruglio and a team at the American Museum of Natural History collaborated with a Canadian company, Research Casting International worked with what they had, using existing bones to create what wasn’t there.

    According to WSJ, the skull was partially designed using a single tooth.

    The giant cast took the Canadian firm more than six months to make, based on 84 fossil bones that were excavated from the site in 2014.

    The real fossils would have been far too heavy to mount, so the life-size model is made up of 3D prints made of fiberglass of the bones.

    With its neck elevated, the titanosaur would have been tall enough to peer into the window of a five-story building, the museum said.

    Now, the Titanosaur will be shown to the public in a walking pose, with its neck stretched out toward the museum’s fourth-floor elevators.

    This is the only way the dinosaur would fit in the building.

    Some of the best-preserved bones will also be on display, amongst them being the massive femur.

    ‘It’s really cool to see [the bones] because they’re this beautiful colour, this deep maroon with pinks and grays,’ Mick Ellison, senior principal artist for the paleontology department at AMNH told WSJ.

    ‘And they’re huge, of course.’

    The dinosaur will certainly make an impression at the Museum of Natural History, which has never held a specimen of this size until now.

    ‘When you see a femur or a vertebra in a museum, of course the bone are really big,’ Carballido told WSJ.

    ‘But when you see the animal with a complete skeleton, you realize how amazing the dinosaur was.’