Titanosaur invades NYC

It’s world’s biggest dinosaur, wowing visitors to the American Museum of Natural History, where it went on public display yesterday. Titanosaur is beyond enormous. Bigger than a T-Rex, as long as a ten-story building.

Everything about Titanosaur is impressive, from the 18 months it took to excavate nearly 100 fossil bones and recreate its missing parts via 3D printing, to the size of its femur, taller than a six-foot construction worker.

Titanosaur is too large to fit into a 100-foot exhibit space, so its head and part of its 39-foot neck stick out of the gallery. It’s a great invitation to go inside and see the rest of this incredible animal

The exhibit is designed so you can walk around this 100-million-year-old Cretaceous Period beast, but not under it as you can with the museum’s famous Blue Whale.

Titonosaur is sure to become the new star of AMNH.

• NYC on the Cheap advises you visit early on a weekeend day, before crowds build up, or after 2pm on a weekday, when school groups have left.

Here’s some of what I learned at the media preview for the Titanosaur the newest permanent resident, on the 4th floor of AMNH :

• This titanosaur weighed around 70 tons, which is as much as 10 African elephants.
• Paleontologists determined the estimated weight from the size and density of that 10-foot femur bone
• The 122-foot-long cast is too large to fit into the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Orientation Center, so its 39-foot-long neck and head extends out towards the elevator banks
• The head, which hangs 9.5 feet above the floor, peeks out of the gallery to welcome visitors to the fossil floor.
• With its neck up, this titanosaur is tall enough to peek into a five-story building.
• Titanosaur was discovered in 2014 in Argentine Patagonia, this dinosaur is so new that it has not even been formally named by the scientists who discovered it, from Argentina’s Museo Paleontológico Egidio Feruglio (MEF).
• The life-sized cast was created over six months by Research Casting International in Ontario, Canada in association with Argentina’s MEF.
• The cast is based on 84 excavated fossil bones.
• The titanosaur skeleton on display does not include any real fossils, which are far too heavy to mount. Instead, its bones are lightweight 3D prints made of fiberglass and based on digital copies of the original fossils.
• Another large sauropod, Apatosaurus, on display a short distance away, almost half the size. At 86 feet long and in life it would have weighed between 30 and 40 tons, roughly half the weight of this 70-ton titanosaur, which is one of the largest sauropods ever discovered.
• AMNH’s 94-foot model of a blue whale is nearly 30 feet shorter than this titanosaur.
• But even with the discovery of this gigantic dinosaur, blue whales are still the heaviest species that ever existed. Blue whales weigh up to 200 tons, compared to this titanosaur’s 70 tons.

Again, our advise on visiting The Titanosaur is to visit early on a weekeend day, before crowds build up, or after 2pm on a weekday, when school groups have left.

photos courtesy American Museum of Natural History