passing under the huge replica of the Patagotitan Mayorum, 37 meters long from nose to tail and 77 tons, makes any human being look tiny in front of the largest land animal ever encountered . Find in the same room the Manidens Condorensis, one of the smallest dinosaurs in the world, only 75 centimeters tall, almost the size of an average dog. Observing the original fossils that have been amazingly preserved for millions of years and that bring these fantastic-looking creatures closer to the present are some of the experiences that can be had until June 2 at the Dinosaurs of Patagonia exhibition at the CosmoCaixa Science Museum in Barcelona. In total, there are 13 species that are in Spain for the first time in the traveling exhibition organized by the Egidio Feruglio Paleontological Museum of Argentina (MEF).
The world of these animals is not foreign to us. Movies such as Jurassic Park have filled cinema seats from the first installment, in 1993, to the most recent, released in 2022. Toy dinosaurs have also accompanied the childhoods of several generations, so it is not surprising that ‘interest that an exhibition like this can cause. That’s why CosmoCaixa repeats the dish. It is the fourth opportunity in which these animals, which dominated the Mesozoic era, arrive in their corridors. “Dinosaurs are always well received. They allow us to understand and take a trip to the past to find out what history was like and better understand the present”, says Elisa Durán, general director of Fundació La Caixa. “They are the only childhood fantasy that remains when we grow up. They are part of science and, therefore, of adult life”, he adds. In the case of Dinosaurs of Patagonia, all the specimens are surprising. The life-size replicas are accompanied by original fossils that give more details about their lives and enrich the experience.
The Patagotitan Mayorum, the big star of the exhibition, seems to hardly enter the second floor of the museum. The 37 meters in length, more than the 32 meters in height of the Batlló house, do not make it go unnoticed. Next to the replica of the Patagotitan is the original femur which allows you to appreciate its size. The femur, almost 2.5 meters long, a little less than the 2.7 meters of Robert Pershing Wadlow, the man who holds the Guinness record for the tallest man in the world, has withstood the passage of time remarkably, in one of the southernmost places in the world and which has been one of the richest for paleontological research. The bones and fossils found in this area allow us to understand the evolution that these animals had, and also to know their habits and dimensions.
For José Luis Carballido, co-discoverer of the Patagotitan Mayorum and MEF researcher, the exhibition “is the result of many years of work. Not only from the museum, but also from other institutions, and that starts in what for paleontologists is going to play in the sand, when we were children. But instead of digging up a toy, you dig up a 77-ton dinosaur.”
And the star is not alone. Replicas of species such as Eoraptor Lunensis and Herrerasaurus Ischgualastenisis, two of the oldest dinosaurs that lived on Earth, some 230 million years ago, can be seen until June 2 at the Science Museum CosmoCaixa de Barcelona.
