Meet the real giants in the world of the dinosaurs

Attenborough and the Giant Dinosaur. Picture: Emilie Sandy

Sir David Attenborough will tell the story of the fossil discovery and reconstruction in Argentina of the largest known dinosaur, a new species of titanosaur.

Measuring 37 metres long – close to four London buses put end to end – and weighing 70 metric tons, latest calculations show that this new giant titanosaur is the biggest animal ever to walk the earth.

In 2014, a shepherd spotted the tip of a gigantic fossil bone sticking out of a rock in La Flecha Farm in the Chubut Province in the Argentinian desert. When the news reached palaeontologists at the Egidio Feruglio Paleontology Museum (MEF) in Trelew, Argentina, they set up camp at the discovery site.

The first bone turned out to be a 2.4m long (femur) thigh bone, the largest ever found. By the end of the dig they had uncovered more than 220 bones.

As the programme reveals, these fossils came from not just one dinosaur but seven, all belonging to a new species of the giant planteating titanosaur which is yet to be given its own scientific name.

Dr Diego Pol, lead scientist on the excavation based at the Museum of Paleontology Egidio Feruglio, Trelew, Argentina said: ‘It was like a paleontological crime scene, a unique thing that you don’t find anywhere else in the world with the potential of discovering all kinds of new facts about titanosaurs.

‘According to our estimates this animal weighed 70 tons. A comparison of the back bones shows that this animal was 10 per cent larger than Argentinosaurus, the previous record holder. So we have discovered the largest dinosaur ever known.’