Ancient Animals - Tumblr Posts
We’re going BIG this Fossil Friday. Like, really big. 🦕At 122 ft (37.2 m) long, Patagotitan mayorum is the Museum’s largest dinosaur on display and one of the largest animals to have ever walked the Earth! This gigantic herbivore, which lived some 95 million years ago during the Late Cretaceous, was heavier than 10 African elephants—tipping the scales at roughly 70 tons. In fact, The Titanosaur is so big that it barely fits in the Museum’s halls: It’s longer than the gallery it sits in—and its head, which would graze the ceiling, extends outwards toward the elevator banks! We're open daily from 10 am-5:30 pm! Plan your visit.
Photo: © AMNHÂ
Research alert! A new study finds that an extremely well-preserved fossil of Triarthrus eatoni from upstate New York has an additional set of legs underneath its head. By making comparisons with another well-preserved trilobite species, Olenoides serratus from British Columbia, researchers from the Museum and Nanjing University in China have proposed a model for how appendages were attached to the head in relation to the grooves in the exoskeleton.Â
“The number of these segments and how they are associated with other important traits, like eyes and legs, is important for understanding how arthropods are related to one another, and therefore, how they evolved,” said Melanie Hopkins, curator and chair of the Museum’s Division of Paleontology.Â