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So you’ve met Hope, the enormous blue whale who swims through the air high above the heads of visitors to the Natural History Museum. You might well remember Dippy, her predecessor, the massive diplodocus who delighted generations of schoolkids. But massive as these two creatures are, they’re nothing compared to the Natural History Museum’s latest skeletal star attraction.
Next year, the museum will host a visit from the biggest creature ever to walk the earth, the titanosaur, who’ll move into the museum’s Waterhouse Gallery as part of a showstopper special exhibition. This as-yet-unnicknamed specimen measures an astonishing 27 metres long, 12 metres longer than Hope. Pop those bones on a scale and you’ll find that it’s four times heavier than poor old Dippy, too.
Known as the patagotitan mayorum, a member of the titanosaur sauropod family, this massive beast once roamed the region now known as Patagonia, its 57-tonne frame making the earth shake when it walked. But what did it look like? And how did this dinosaur find enough to eat when it was three times the length of a double-decker bus? An accompanying exhibition called ‘Titanosaur: Life as the Biggest Dinosaur’ will explore some of these intriguing biographical questions, tracking its life from football-sized egg to gigantic grown-up, as well looking at some of the massive beasts that roam the earth today.
Unlike Hope and Dippy, Patagotitan is on loan from Argentina, where he was excavated in 2014. That means you’ve only got a limited amount of time to pay him a visit: so get ye to South Kensington before he strides back over the ocean to his South American home.
‘Titanosaur: Life as the Biggest Dinosaur’ is at the Natural History Museum, Mar 31 2023-Jan 7 2024. £16, child tickets £9.
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