(AMNH/DFinnin)
The old bony dinosaur, a barosaurus that rears up to greet you inside the rotunda at the American Museum of Natural History, now has an older playmate on the fourth floor — a mamenchisaurus.
The recent addition is part of the new super-size exhibit, “The World’s Largest Dinosaurs,” which opens today. Unlike more familiar dinosaur-fossil exhibits, this one features a fleshed-out mamenchisaurus: an 11-foot-tall (at the shoulders), 60-foot-long, life-size dinosaur known for its 30-foot neck. A long neck was the signature trait of a sauropod, which this exhibit is all about.
As you enter the fourth-floor display, look up. You’ll be greeted by an argentinosaurus — the world’s largest sauropod, which lived about 95 million years ago. It’s so huge, curators were able to show just its head and part of its neck, the only sections that would fit in the room. Weighing about 90 tons, the equivalent of 12 African elephants, it stretched 140 feet in length, equal to four NYC buses.
Around the corner is the mamenchisaurus, the show’s star. It took designer Hall Train six months to create the humongous creature using Fiberglas and epoxy over an aluminum frame. “It’s the same stuff they use for fighter planes; it’s lightweight and durable,” says Train. “I made this from a model one-twelfth the size, and used a digital map of the skin on a sculpture to make it come to life.”
But this big girl is almost too big for the room — her head touches the ceiling and her tail is practically out the door.
Don’t let the size of these supersauruses (their super-scientific name) intimidate you — you could have easily outsmarted them millions of years ago: Their brains only weighed about 4 ounces! (The average human brain weighs 3 pounds.)
Turn the page for some prehistoric highlights of the exhibit, on display until January.
Bones
If you still can’t comprehend just how big dinosaurs were, an interactive tool helps you measure the length of your femur and convert it into what it would weigh if it belonged to a dinosaur. (Post writer Alisa Wolfson is 5-foot-8, and one of her legs would have weighed in at 746 pounds if she were a dinosaur.)
Leafy greens
Today’s dietary guidelines suggest humans eat five to seven servings of fruits and veggies per day. Sauropods, however, had to eat 1,000 pounds per day. A 5-by-5-foot glass box is filled with the daily amount of leafy edibles — including ginkgo, ferns, broadleaf trees, grasses and some oddly named greens like horsetail and monkey puzzle — that a dinosaur needed daily to survive. This diet contained about 100,000 calories.
Digging for fossils
Put your safety goggles on, pick up the tools and pretend you’re a paleontologist. Excavate fossils from a sand pit inspired by a fossil-rich site in Wyoming, and watch a video of real paleontologists at work to get a sense of what you’re looking for (hint: bones).
Pump and compare
Get ready for an arm workout as you pump a lever up and down to simulate a heart pumping 630 quarts of blood throughout a sauropod’s body. If you need a break, you can compare the challenge to that of pumping blood (6.5 quarts) through a human heart — a much easier exercise!
Teeth
At the “teeth” station, stop to check out (and touch!) a dinosaur skull (shown here) and compare it to a horse skull. You can also feel teeth from a water buffalo, a lion, a cow and some sauropods. Dino fact: Their teeth re-grew once a month due to the heavy wear and tear caused by their crunchy vegetarian diet.