One hundred million years may be a long time to wait, but the new Titanosaur at the American Museum of Natural History looked cool, calm and collected in its first brush with the public on Thursday.
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The museum features several other famous exhibits, including a massive blue whale and a T-Rex that was featured in the 2006 movie, Night at the Museum.
The size of the prehistoric creature was so huge that it couldn’t even fit in the gallery space. Part of its 39-foot-long neck will extend through the passageway to greet visitors.
Because paleontologists were only able to uncover 70% of the ancient creature’s bones (an impressive amount, by any measure), the missing bones were recreated and modeled after bones belonging to close relatives of the titanosaur.
Getting to this particular dinosaur required building a road, removing a hill and making 18 trips to the site, said Diego Pol from the Museo Paleontologico Edigio Fergulio in Trelew, Patagonia, who helped make the discovery. “That’s the only way an animal like this could get so big”, according to museum curator Mark Norell. As it turns out, the hall also isn’t long enough to completely hold the dinosaur, as the titanosaur’s head protrudes from its exhibit room into an adjoining entranceway. They have long necks and whip-like tails, small heads, and walk on four thick legs.
One enormous femur found at the site will be among five original fossils temporarily on view with the titanosaur, the museum said.
This dinosaur, a vegetarian which largely ate the foliage of trees, weighed about 77 tons, what the museum calls the equivalent of 15 African elephants, when it stomped around Argentina’s Patagonia region, 95 million years ago.
The titanosaur that is on display at the museum was cast from 84 of the unearthed remains.
Scientists believe the adolescent may have been separated from his group and died of hunger or stress. Over half of the re-created skeleton was 3D printed from computer scans of the fossils that were found.
The titanosaur is on display in the Wallach Orientation Center on the fourth floor of the museum.
The dinosaur, so recently discovered it is not yet formally named, is so tall that the cast of its skeleton grazes the museum’s 19-foot (6-meter) ceilings, the museum that featured in the 2006 “Night at the Museum” film said in a statement.
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“Isn’t he something?” asked Ellen Futter, president of the museum, before adding a stipulation: “For the record, we don’t actually know if it’s a he or a she”.
