The Daily Observer London Desk: Reporter- John Furner
Forget the terrifying T-Rex or Dippy the Diplodocus – there’s a new beast in town.
Weighing in at 57 tonnes and stretching 121ft from head to tail, the Natural History Museum’s new dinosaur is the heaviest animal ever to walk our planet.
Named Patagotitan mayorum, the sheer scale of this titanosaur makes other prehistoric life almost appear petite.
And that meant careful planning was required by museum experts, who could only just manage to fit the replica skeleton inside their enormous 30ft-high Waterhouse Gallery.
The species was first uncovered in 2010 by an Argentinian farmer, who spotted a gigantic dinosaur bone poking out of the dusty ground.
Weighing in at 65 tonnes and stretching 121ft from head to tail, the Natural History Museum’s new dinosaur is the heaviest animal ever to walk our planet
The skeleton is 115 feet (35 m) in length, the equivalent of four double decker buses or a British Airways’ Airbus A320. This also makes it 40 feet (12 m) longer than the blue whale, Hope, currently displayed in the atrium at the Natural History Museum
I
The species was first uncovered in 2010 by an Argentinian farmer, who spotted a gigantic dinosaur bone poking out of the dusty ground
Titanosaurs were the last great family of sauropod dinosaurs before the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event, about 65 million years ago
