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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.
Measuring 122 feet in length, The Titanosaur is so big that its head extends outside of its new home in the Museum's fourth-floor gallery.
The Titanosaur lived in the forests of today’s Patagonia about 100 to 95 million years ago, during the Late Cretaceous period, and is one of the largest dinosaurs ever discovered. Dr. Mark Norell, chair and Macaulay Curator in the Division of Paleontology, describes how such a massive animal could have supported its own weight and why this animal is one of the more spectacular recent finds in paleontology.