Patagotitan is likely the biggest dinosaur to have walked the Earth. Here’s how it lived its supersized life.
Words by SARAH MCPHERSON
Millions of years ago, Earth was ruled by giants. Pterosaurs with 12m wingspans darkened the skies, dragonflies the size of widescreen televisions buzzed among the undergrowth and sauropods the length of a jumbo jet browsed the treetops.
And there was one that was probably bigger than them all: the Cretaceous colossus that was Patagotitan mayorum, whose replica skeleton currently fills the Waterhouse Gallery at the Natural History Museum.
Clocking up some 57 tonnes in weight and measuring 37m from nose to tail, Patagotitan is the largest, most complete dinosaur currently known. It was a member of the titanosaur family, in turn part of the wider sauropod group known for their immensely long necks and thick, squat limbs. Diplodocus was a sauropod, as was Brachiosaurus – the gentle creature we see feeding from the canopy in that captivating scene in Jurassic Park. But while we’ve known about ‘Dippy’ and Brachiosaurus for more than a century, Patagotitan was only discovered in 2010, hot on the hefty heels of many other new titans, such as Puertasaurus (2001), Dreadnoughtus (2005) and Argentinosaurus (1987).
Indeed, we are currently experiencing something of a golden age of dinosaur discovery. An average of 50 new species are being added to the tally each year, with a current running total of about 700 (and counting). The boom has been driven by two main factors. “There are now many more people working on dinosaurs in countries in South America, Africa and Asia, which didn’t have palaeontologists before,” says Paul Barrett, dinosaur specialist at the Natural History Museum in London. “These locations are naturally rich in fossil remains, so the rate of discovery is going up. We’re also finding new species by re-assessing existing collections. In my time at the Museum, we’ve discovered about 10 new species from material that hadn’t yet been worked on or had been misidentified.”
Patagotitan, though, hailed not from a dusty basement but from the remote badlands of Argentinian Patagonia. He didn’t know it then, but when farm worker Aurelio Hernandez spotted a thumping great femur sticking out of the ground near La Flecha, he had chanced upon the 101-million-year-old remains of the largest animal ever to have walked the Earth. Not only that, there were six of them, a small herd that had likely succumbed to a natural catastrophe. “Patago
