Attenborough and the Giant Dinosaur Page #4

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from predators, as young ostriches do.

Microscopic analysis of

dinosaur leg bones show rings,

rather like tree rings,

and these indicate that

titanosaurs grew very swiftly

early in their lives

and they could have lived for some 50 years,

plenty of time to become enormous.

The team now has 150 bones of our titanosaur,

enough to get an idea,

not only of its weight,

but also its height and length.

Now,

the plan is to build a life-size reproduction

of the complete skeleton.

It's a challenge to find a place

big enough to house an animal that's

four times longer than a London

bus and nearly twice its height.

But Diego thinks he's found one.

It's an old wool warehouse.

One, two, three, four,

five, six, seven...

We have been looking for

a place that is big enough

to fit our dinosaur.

This seems to be it.

This is a warehouse that we could use,

not only in terms of the length,

this is 70 metres long,

but also it's very important

in terms of the height.

So we need a place not only long,

but really high.

It really needs a little bit of decoration,

but I think it will do it.

It's going to be awesome!

Putting the skeleton together will help us

understand the particular

challenges of being such a giant.

So, next, an international team

of skeleton builders arrive

to scan the bones ready to make a

3-D computer model of each of them.

3-D scanning,

accurate to 0.01 of a millimetre,

allows images of the bones to be

placed in a virtual reality world

so that they can now be

examined from all points of view

without needing eight people to lift them.

One of the mysteries

surrounding our dinosaur is,

how could an animal as big as

it was actually move about?

The computer data allows us

to put our dinosaur leg bones together in 3-D

and then compare the arrangement with

what we know about living animals.

Elephants are the largest

land animal alive today.

They, like titanosaurs,

have to move their massive bodies around

without their bones shattering

under the enormous weight.

I've come to meet Professor John Hutchinson

here at ZSL Whipsnade Zoo.

He's studied elephants for many

years and has joined the team

that's investigating the internal

workings of our titanosaur.

We have about a one-metre long

pressure sensitive mat out there

with several thousand sensors in

it and it's telling us, in very

high resolution, what the pressure

on an elephant's foot is like.

We can see on the elephant's foot here...

- Here she goes...

- Oh, yeah! Great.

- Oh, that was a perfect one!

- Bull's-eye!

The pressure hits the ground,

rolls over and then pushes

off with its toenails.

So we can see there some hot colours,

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