The biggest dinosaur to ever walk the Earth is coming to the UK as part of an exhibition at a museum in London.
A replica skeleton of the Patagotitan mayorum, one of the biggest members of the “titanosaur” group, will be on show at the National History Museum from 31 March.
The giant specimen, which weighed a whopping 57 tonnes - the equivalent of nine elephants - pushed the boundaries of anatomy and physics.
“There is going to come a point at which the strength of bones, and the effectiveness of the heart and lungs, just stop working for a really large animal on land,” Professor Paul Barrett, a dinosaur expert working at the NHM, said.
“And I suspect we are getting towards that limit.”
A 2017 study proclaimed that the plant-eating Patagotitan mayorum - thought to be as long as three London buses and half the width of a football pitch - was the biggest of all dinosaurs.
The herbivore lived over 100 million years ago and ate plants, moving around slowly due to its size. It had to consume around 120kg of food a day to survive, using its long neck to reach the top of monkey puzzle trees.
The dinosaur’s fossils were found in southern Argentina in 2013. Researchers who examined and dated them said the long-necked creature was the biggest of a group of large dinosaurs called titanosaurs.
“There was one small part of the family that went crazy on size,” said Diego Pol of the Egidio Feruglio palaeontology museum in Argentina, co-author of the study published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
The researchers named the dinosaur Patagotitan mayorum after the Patagonia region where it was found and the Greek word titan, which means large. The second name honours a ranch family that hosted the researchers.
Six fossils of the species were studied and dated to about 100 million years ago, based on ash found around them, Pol said. The dinosaur averaged 122 feet long (37 metres) and was nearly 20 feet high (6 metres) at the shoulder.
Legendary T-Rex and other meat-eaters “look like dwarfs when you put them against one of these giant titanosaurs,” Mr Pol said. “It’s like when you put an elephant by a lion.”
Kristi Curry Rodgers, a palaeontologist at Macalester College who wasn’t part of the study, praised the work as important.
She said the fact that Patagotitan’s bones show signs that they haven’t completed their growth “means that there are even bigger dinosaurs out there to discover.”
