They may be more than 100 million years old, but it didn’t take scientists that long to reconstruct the latest resident of New York’s American Museum of Natural History.

This is a titanosaur, a giant herbivore spanning 122 feet (37 metres) now standing in the institute’s fossil hall. Well, almost… The skeleton is so big that its long neck and head poke out, offering a surprise greeting to visitors.

Palaeontologists think the dinosaur would have weighed about 70 tonnes; that’s the weight of ten elephants. One of the largest dinosaurs ever found, the species was first discovered in 2014 in Argentina’s Patagonia region where titanosaurs roamed the forest 100 million years ago.

This dinosaur’s remains were excavated in the Argentinian desert after palaeontologists were given a tip from a rancher who noticed the fossils on his land. One enormous femur found at the site will be among five original fossils temporarily on view at the museum.

The creatures on display may be extinct, but with five million visitors to the museum each year, is it clear that our interest in them certainly is not.

Difficult words: resident (somebody who resides – lives somewhere), herbivore (an animal that feeds on plants), spanning (being long), fossil (the remains of an animal), poke out (to be out and to be visible), palaeontologist (a scientist who studies bones), species (an animal kind), roam (to live, to move around), excavate (to dig out), enormous (very big), femur (a large leg bone),temporarily (only for some time), creature (an animal or something that lives), extinct (this means two things – there will be no more animals of this type and to lose interest).

Source: www.ondemandnews.com

 

In Argentina in 2014, people first discovered Titanosaurs, which are dinosaurs. They lived in the forests of Patagonia 100 million years ago.

Source: Titanosaur in New York