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Recently Discovered Titanosaur Is So Huge, It Barely Fits into a Museum

The colossal dinosaur is in the running for the largest land animal of all time.
Researcher Pablo Puerta next to the titanosaur's femur. Image: José María Farfaglia and Museo Paleontológico Egidio Feruglio.

A full-size cast of one of the largest animals ever to walk the planet will be unveiled at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) next month. Measuring 122 feet long and weighing in at about 70 tons, this giant titanosaur lived about 100 million years ago in Cretaceous Argentina. A wealth of its remains were discovered in Patagonia last year, so recently that the species hasn't even been given an official name yet.

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"What they discovered is a cemetery of dinosaurs the likes of which we had never seen in the history of Argentine paleontology," Ruben Cuneo, director of the Museo Paleontológico Egidio Feruglio, told US News in the wake of the find.

"Given the length and magnitude this animal will bring along when it's reconstructed, there won't be a building that can contain it. I think we're going to need a new home."

Indeed, the dinosaur was so colossal that curators couldn't fit the entire length of its skeleton cast into the fourth floor gallery where it will be on view. The neck actually extends out into the elevator corridor to "greet" visitors, according to the AMNH. This setup should give people an idea of how jaw-droppingly massive this titanosaur was, even when compared to other famous long-necked sauropods, like Brontosaurus and Diplodocus.