Attenborough and the Giant Dinosaur Page #2

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One bone like this has already

cracked in half without warning.

Bravo!

THEY LAUGH:

And so this is the position as it was in life

with the centre of the backbone there,

then this is the crest on the top.

Right, right, and this belongs

to the middle part of the thorax.

- Right about here.

- About that. - Yeah, yeah.

'Many more weeks of detailed examination

'will be needed before the

backbones reveal all their secrets.'

Surprisingly, perhaps,

one of the first things

the team was able to deduce about

our titanosaur is its weight.

That's because, after finding the thigh bone,

they discover another huge bone

from the front leg - a humerus.

By measuring the circumference

of each of these leg bones,

it's possible to estimate how

much weight they could support.

Let's see how much.

We'll measure this.

- 79.

- 79? Wow!

I'm not sure how that

translates to body weight.

- Yeah, around 70 tonnes or even more, probably.

- Wow!

That's really big.

It's amazing.

That evening, Dr Jose Luis

Carballido checks his calculations.

Until now, Argentinosaurus was

the heaviest known dinosaur.

Ours already looks bigger.

Could this mean it was the largest

animal ever to walk the earth?

Could it also be a new species?

We can't be sure...yet.

The rocks of Patagonia,

so bare of vegetation,

also contain astonishing evidence of

how titanosaurs began their lives.

I've now come nearly 500 miles north

from our Patagonian dinosaur excavation

to a place called Auca Mahuevo.

This is the largest dinosaur

nesting ground yet discovered.

The remains of their eggs and

their nests are wherever I look.

In fact, it's quite difficult for me

to take a step without walking

on a dinosaur eggshell.

Over thousands of years,

the wind and the rain have

cleared away the soft rock

that once enclosed these fragments

and they can tell us quite a lot

about how titanosaurs reproduced.

Careful excavation has

shown that these dinosaurs

laid eggs in clutches of

up to 30 or 40 at a time.

They would have looked

rather like these replicas

because they lay on the

surface of the ground,

not covered by soil,

but in a shallow depression.

Sometimes, though,

remains of vegetation have

been found in some nests,

which suggests that the dinosaurs

might have used rotting leaves

to help with the incubation.

The dinosaur that laid these

eggs here were medium-sized.

Our dinosaur that we're excavating,

probably laid eggs as big as that.

I'm shown around by Dr Luis Chiappe who,

with his team,

discovered this remarkable site.

Dinosaur eggs here were

laid on an old river plain.

Then the river flooded and

covered the unhatched eggs,

preserving them in mud.

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