Have you seen Jurassic Park and Jurassic World ? Who has not ? But if you really have not seen these two movies, ask your mum or dad to get you a DVD of the movies featuring giant dinosaurs that lived over 65 million years ago. Do you know why these majestic beasts are no longer living on Earth ? Well, they were wiped out in when a huge Asteroid fell to Earth and blackened the skies for months, killing most life on the planet.
If you have already seen the movies, you will not be able to forget the giant dinosaur T Rex which runs after and attacks the jeep in which two young children are travelling. But what if I tell you that even bigger dinosaurs existed at the time that even T Rex was left shaking? That aside, how exactly do we know this ?
Scientists have found well preserved whole skeletons of dinosaurs from many parts of the world – we call them fossils. When these animals died, they probably ended up in a marshy land, which perfectly preserved their skeletons. By analyzing the skeletons carefully, scientists can reconstruct how they looked like in real life. This is how the movie makers were able to realistically recreate the dinosaurs.
But can you imagine a dinosaur bigger than the T-Rex ? There were many dinosaurs bigger than T-Rex, but most of them were plant eaters, not meat eaters like T Rex. Now scientists in Argentina have discovered the biggest of them all – the length of three double Decker buses, weighing nearly 70 tons, heavier than 10 adult African elephants, this dinosaur was the largest animal to ever walk on Earth, around 100 million years ago. Incidentally, plant eating dinosaurs had plenty to eat those days, since flowering plants had just appeared on Earth.
Now scientifically called Patagotitan mayorum, with “Patagotitan” referring to the giant from Patagonia, (Argentina) more than 150 Patagotitan fossils have been unearthed there over the past few years. Patagotitan, which lived about 100 million years ago during the late Cretaceous Period, is considered a titanosaur, a diverse line of plant-eating, long-necked dinosaurs with long tails that walked on four legs.
While Jurassic Park showed a process for recreating dinosaurs by using their preserved DNA, it is not so easy to do in real life, so do not expect this dinosaur or T Rex to walk on Earth again anytime soon. Incidentally, scientists say that T Rex will look like a dwarf when standing next to this giant dinosaur.
A cast of the giant dinosaur’s skeleton is already on display at the American Museum of Natural History. It is so big that the dinosaur’s head sticks out into a hallway at the New York Museum. This is one exhibit you should see if you get a chance to visit New York. Let’s hope that the next installment in the Jurassic Park series (Fallen Kingdom) coming out in June 2018 will feature this gigantic herbivorous dinosaur.