Video: Meet the titanosaur. It’s the newest exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History, and it’s a dinosaur cast so large it doesn’t even fit into a single room.
The exhibit, which opened yesterday, features a full replica of a 70-tonne titanosaur’s bones, which were uncovered in 2012 as part of a massive dig in Argentina. Peter May — the president of Research Casting International, who was responsible for building the 37m-long replica — talked to Gizmodo to explain the process by which his team casted and assembled the skeleton into the full titanosaur you can see stretching out across the museum now.
Even with the light, 3D-printed fibreglass replica bones, the lengthy skeleton still presented a weight problem. Extra steel reinforcements keep the dinosaur’s long neck and tail stretched away from each other and stable. The final skeleton not only takes up an entire room, but spans an additional 3m out the door.
Video by Nicholas Stango