The odds of survival aren’t great – just one in 100 – but the rewards are superlative: a chance to be one of the largest animals ever to walk the earth. That is what it was like being born a Patagotitan, the star of the Natural History Museum’s new exhibition on Titanosaurs.
Patagotitan young were as miniscule as the mature adults were gigantic. Freshly hatched from a 15cm egg, they weighed as much as a human baby. Fully grown they were 57 tons. Put another way, the little vegetarian hatchlings had to increase their bodyweight by an awe-inspiring (and scarcely believable) 16,000 times. That’s a lot of ferns to munch.
