The Titanosaur Arrives

by AMNH on Jan 15, 2016 2:06 pm

It’s here!

As of today, visitors can see The Titanosaur, a 122-foot-long cast of a gigantic dinosaur discovered in 2014 and now permanently installed in the Miriam and Ira Wallach Orientation Center on the fourth floor.

A crowd of people in front of the Titanosaur exhibit raise their phones up to take photos.

A flurry of media attention accompanied The Titanosaur's unveiling.
©AMNH/M. Shanley

One of the largest dinosaurs ever discovered, this giant herbivore was unearthed in Argentina’s Patagonia region in 2014 by a team of paleontologists from the Museo Paleontologico Egidio Feruglio. One of the team's leaders, Diego Pol, received his Ph.D. degree in a joint program between Columbia University and the Museum under the guidance of Macaulay Curator of Paleontology Mark Norell.

The species is so new to science that it has yet to be formally named. The discovery was an exciting one for not just those involved, but for the field as a whole.

“There’s nothing like finding a great new fossil—especially a big one,” said Mike Novacek, the Museum’s senior vice-president and provost of science.

MARK NORELL: A new dinosaur is coming to the halls of the American Museum of Natural History. This Titanosaur is a really huge animal. It's over 120 feet long. It lived in what's now present-day Argentina about 100 million years ago. The last 20 years have really been the new Golden Age of dinosaur discovery. New kinds of animals have been found all over the world - in Africa, in Asia, in Patagonia - and this is just one of the latest ones. A couple years ago, one of my ex-graduate students Diego Pohl sent me an email saying that a farmer near Treleo in Patagonia had found an amazing dinosaur, one of the largest land animals ever to live. Over the next couple of years, they extracted this specimen from the rocks at the ranch.

PETER MAY: We went down to Argentina and we 3D-scanned all the bones in the field and in the lab. We had the whole skeleton completely digitized in 4 weeks. We took the data and then we carved the bones out of slabs of foam with our 5-axis milling machine. We molded all the elements once they're carved up, and then we have a complete copy of the skeleton and from there we can cast all the elements out of fiberglass. Then the cast gets mounted.

NORELL: When you're trying to determine the mass or the weight of an animal this big, it's pretty tough. A good example of that is if you pick up a puppy, it's pretty heavy compared to picking up a bird - a chicken - that's about the same size. That's because their bones are constructed very differently. The bones of this Titanosaur, were not hollow - they were what we call cancellous, so they have lots of little tiny air pockets all through them like a piece of styrofoam. So the bones themselves would be very, very, very light. That's the only way an animal like this could get so big. We chose to display this animal now because it represents one of the newest big dinosaurs thats been found anywhere in the world. We have some tremendous things here. We have the blue whale, we have the Tyrannosaurus rex, we have the Barosaurus, and now we're going to have the Titanosaur.

Many new species of dinosaurs, and especially large species, are still being discovered outside of well-explored environs in North America and Europe, said Dr. Pol, who co-led the 18-month-long excavation of the fossil. “We are finding these creatures in South America and Central Asia, places that are much less explored,” Pol said.

Paleontologists Mike Novacek, Diego Pol, and Mark Norell seated beneath the Titanosaur fossil, holding microphones in front of a seated audience.

The fossil skeleton for this new species is much more complete than those of other giant dinosaurs, like Argentinosaurus, which is known only from a few vertebrae, said Pol. In total, scientists discovered 223 fossil bones from six individuals at the site, and the Museum's cast, crafted by experts at Research Casting International, is based on 84 fossil bones. These include a femur bone larger than a human being which, along with several other original fossils, is on temporary display near the cast during 2016.

While this titanosaur specimen is a momentous find, it’s likely not the last one that will come from the region, said Norell.

“One of the things about the titanosaurs that makes them so interesting is that they’re known from every continent,” he said. “If I was going to pick any place to go looking for them, I think where...Diego [and team] are looking would be a really good place.”