Sir David Attenborough tells the story of the fossil discovery and reconstruction of the largest known dinosaur, a new species of titanosaur. Measuring 37m long – close to four school 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 2013, 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 documentary reveals, these fossils came from not just one dinosaur but seven, all belonging to a new species of the giant plant-eating titanosaur which is yet to be given its own scientific name.
Attenborough And The Giant Dinosaur follows the twists and turns of this forensic investigation. Sir David Attenborough witnesses the uncovering, cleaning and examination of these vast fossils for the first time. Using state-of-the-art graphics the film reveals what scientists think the internal structure of a dinosaur looked like and how it worked.