Digging up a giant dinosaur

There’s a fascinating story behind the discovery of the world’s biggest dinosaur.  

It begins in 2012 with a man and his dog, tracking down a herd of lost sheep on his ranch in the Chebut Province of Patagonia.

After searching for many hours, he and his trusty sheepdog finally found the herd, but that wasn’t the only discovery of the day. He also spotted a suspiciously round rock poking out of the ground. As he approached and his dog sniffed curiously around the area, he pondered its usually precise, round shape. It was like nothing he had ever seen before.

Weeks later, the farmer visited Trelew, the city nearest his ranch. As his passed the museum, the dinosaur skeleton near the door made him stop in his tracks. Parts of it looked so… familiar.

He walked up to the receptionist at the front desk, pointed at the skeleton and told her he had found a bone on his ranch that looked just like the one in the display, except the one he found was much, much bigger.

The receptionist called over two palaeontologists – Jose and Diego – who were eager to understand just how much bigger this bone could be than the one in their display. The man offered for them to come to his ranch about 3 hours’ drive away as his guests to see for themselves what he had seen. Jose and Diego could scarcely have imagined the adventure that lay ahead of them.

The next day on the ranch, Jose took one look and confirmed that the object protruding from the rocky ground was in fact a dinosaur bone, likely a giant herbivore. But it raised even more questions like just how big it was, and which prehistoric creature did it belong to.  The only way to know for sure involved a seven day-long excavation that eventually revealed a femur bone measuring seven feet 10 inches long – the biggest dinosaur bone ever found.

This incredible discovery sparked a full-scale palaeontological dig revealing more and more pieces of a gigantic puzzle. Tail, hip, shoulder and leg bones all pointed to the skeleton belonging to a titanosaur.

The bones fit together and were preserved so well that Jose and Diego were able to take bone measurements to determine the weight of the titanosaur, revealing it weighed seventy tonnes, about the same as ten adult African elephant bulls.

A month more of careful digging, chipping and brushing later and the team had uncovered almost two hundred bones from seven different dinosaurs. So immense was the excavation that the museum team almost ran out of preservation materials for the bones and a bulldozer was required to flatten and fortify a road to transfer the bones out the dig site!

After one hundred million years in the earth, these dinosaur bones had revealed themselves to tell a colossal prehistoric story from ancient Patagonia, and the dig was just the beginning of this epic tale.

To discover the rest of the incredible story about the Dinosaurs of Patagonia, visit the exhibition before it closes on 2 October 2023.

The story in this blog is based on the book ‘Digging up a giant dinosaur’ which was written and illustrated by the scientific team who led the dig and is a perfect keepsake for your visit, igniting imaginations young and… more fossilised. Add it to your cart with tickets or pick it up at QM Shop.