Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs:Titanosaur @ the NHM.

Titanosaurs were big. They were, on current evidence, the biggest of all the dinosaurs and the biggest beasts that ever walked the land (though they're not as big as blue whales - the biggest creatures that ever lived - and still live, at least about 10,000 of them, now). They were nine times heavier than African savannah elephants (the largest extant land animals) at fifty-seven tonnes and about 122ft long - roughly the length of three double decker buses.

I was at London's Natural History Museum (on a Saturday so more full of kids than ever) to see their exhibition, Titanosaur:Life as the Biggest Dinosaur, and I wasn't sure exactly what to expect. There was a lot of stuff, quite rightly, for kids and as an adult on my own I did feel a bit awkward at times. But, hey, I like dinosaurs too. I had every right to be there.

It began with a bit of background about dinosaurs (for those yet to hear of them!?) and how, over a hundred million years ago, as pterosaurs flapped overhead, insects buzzed, and lizards basked in the heat, the gigantic titanosaurs towered over all other life, their long necks helping them reach leaves high on trees. The biggest of all the titanosaurs (as far as we so far know) was recently discovered, in 2010, by a Patagonian farmer and, because of this, has become known as the patagotatan. There's a skeleton of one in the main room of the exhibition but we have to build up to that.

The farmer had spotted a dinosaur bone poking out of the ground and this was reported to scientists who came to investigate further. During a series of digs spread across two years, hundreds more patagotitan bones were discovered. Believed to come from six different individual specimens that had all died in the area. By piecing these bones together, experts have recreated an entire skeleton - and it's a big one.

We start with teasers. A nearly 8ft long femur bone (over five times the size of an average human femur) revealed just how enormous this dinosaur would have been and helped scientists to calculate just how heavy the living thing would have been - very!

It helped that they also found shoulder (scapula), humerus, radius, and ulna (arm) bones too. It had been known, since 1852, that sauropods (the class titanosaurs belong to) had scaly skin when an imprint of a dinosaur's skin that had been made on soft ground had been preserved when that ground went hard. This was in Hastings in Sussex, a place that - if you've visited - you will already be aware contains a fair amount of dinosaurs of a different kind.

 

Fossil titanosaur femur, Patagonia, Argentina (around 101 million years old)

 

Fossil titanosaur scapula, humerus, and radius and ulna, Patagonia, Argentina (around 101 million years old)

 

Dinosaur skin impression, Hastings, UK (around 140-133 million years old)

 

Titanosaur coprolite, Maharashtra, India (around 72-66 million years ago)

 

Patagotitan mayorum tooth (replica) (around 101 million years old)

 

There's even a fossilised dinosaur turd (sorry, coprolite) for visitors to marvel at - all the way from India, it reveals that titanosaurs were not picky eaters. It seems unlikely, at their size, they could afford to be.

The only part of a patagotitan's skull yet discovered is one peg shaped tooth (a replica is on show at the NHM, it's presumed the original is around 101 million years old and not the copy) but it's enough to give us an idea of what the creature's, apparently fragile, skull looked like. There's also a very old egg on show and we learn that titanosaurs used to make nests near volcanoes, it is believed to keep the eggs warm. The patagotitan hatchlings looked just like the adults - except they were an astonishing 16,000 times smaller.

 

They had to be small because they were born in pretty huge batches. Adult titanosaurs didn't look after their children so out of every one hundred babies born only about one would survive. Cold blooded (and, sometimes, warm blooded) old times! It's a method that turtles, snakes, and other reptiles still use to this day. Give birth to loads of babies and at least one of them will probably survive. It's a not a route mammals have chosen to go down. Which means mammals have small enough numbers of offspring to be able to devote time to looking after them. On balance, I'm glad I was born a mammal.

 

Titanosaur egg, India (about 69 million years ago)

 

There's even a game, as part of the exhibition and more for the kids I'm afraid, in which you, the visitor, can help the patagotitan hatchlings make it to the shelter of the forest before they're eaten by a predator about twenty times their size. I had a little go but felt it best left for younger visitors!

 

If these hatchlings managed to survive their early days without being gobbled up, they soon started to grow fast. It took them two months to grow to ten times their weight (it takes humans ten years to do the same). The larger the youthful patagotitans grew, the harder it was for predators to catch them so the fastest growing individuals became the most likely to survive which led, over millions of years, to patagotitans reaching such huge sizes and, over a hundred million years later, starring in exhibitions like this.

 

I turned a corner - and there it was. A skeleton of a full sized patagotitan. Too big to really capture in a single photo, there is no way you could not describe it as imposing and it was impossible not to imagine what it would look like, together with several of its buddies, stomping across the prehistoric world, tail swishing behind it, in search of food. Always, one imagines, in search of food.

 

A titanosaur, especially a patagotitan, is never full. Because of its long neck, and this must also apply to giraffes, it can't chew its food so just grabs it off the tree, prickles and all, and swallows it whole. One patagotitan would eat the equivalent of 1,600 bowls of salad every day. If they were around now they'd be barred from visiting Harvesters.

 

Dinosaurs, one can safely assume, did not have the most refined of palates. They were, however, at least generous towards other, much smaller, creatures. Dung beetles would feast on titanosaur turds. Dung beetles, one must also assume, were even less fussy eaters than patagotitans.

Being absolutely massive wasn't all eating and plodding though. Most animals, like humans - that's us, absorb oxygen from the air when they breathe in. Patagotitans needed more oxygen because of their size so they absorbed it when breathing in AND breathing out. Today's birds do the same though none of them are even close to the patagotitan in size. I had a look round the rest of the Natural History Museum afterwards and saw nothing larger than an ostrich.

Being that mahoosive, however, meant they didn't fear many predators. Not once they were full size. Bulk and power, as with elephants today, was their main defence but, also, they sought safety in numbers. Attacking one patagotitan may have been a fool's errand, attacking a group of them must have amounted to a kamikaze mission. Evidence shows that smaller members of the group walked on the inside and the larger on the outside to offer protection. Of course, the harder the patagotitans were to kill, the larger they grew and the larger they grew, the harder they were to kill. 

 

They had it all worked out - though on the rare occasions they did fall prey they would provide huge feasts for carnivorous dinosaurs like the tyrannotitan, one of whose skulls we can see below.

 

Tyrannotitan chubutensis skull (replica), Patagonia, Argentina (about 101 million years old)

It's highly unlikely that tyrannotitan attacks caused the extinction of the patagotitans but nobody is sure exactly what did for them. They disappeared about thirty-five million years before the other titanosaurs - and, in fact, all other dinosaurs except the birds. Only six individual patagotitans have ever been identified and in the ensuing time (just several million years) mammals have taken over as the largest creatures on Earth.

 

From woolly mammoths and giant rhinos to today's elephants and giraffes. It wouldn't be an exhibition on nature in 2023 if it didn't end on a conservational note (quite rightly, too) and this one ends with a warning that just as the dinosaurs disappeared so could the giant mammals we love today. As humans, ever more rapidly, continue to encroach into animal habitats (potentially causing killer viruses as they do) these animals become ever more vulnerable and it is up to us, us humans, to make sure they are protected. Once they're gone they won't come back.

Of course, that's not the final room of the show. Even more surely than you get a sombre note about conservation, you get a gift shop and this one's a good one. You can buy titanosaur baseball caps, titanosaur t-shirts, cuddly titanosaurs, and even bags of edible titanosaur poo. Yum. Both my nephew, Alex, and my god-daughter, Evie, would have loved this when they were younger (and may still do) but have, temporarily hopefully, grown out of their dinosaur obsessions. I'm just getting back into mine and Saturday was a day out fit for both a small boy and a boring old man. Following the exhibition, I came home and drank some fizzy lemonade and even allowed myself to stay up late and watch Match of the Day before going to bed and, sadly, not dreaming of dinosaurs.