SYDNEY, March 16 (Xinhua) -- Australia's Queensland Museum will showcase the largest dinosaur ever discovered in the world in its latest exhibition "Dinosaurs of Patagonia", which will kick off on Friday.
Spanning most of the dinosaur eras of the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous, the exhibition will feature 13 dinosaur species from massive meat eaters to pint-sized herbivores, 16 skeleton casts, and real fossils from South America.
Visitors can come face-to-face with a life-size replica of Patagotitan mayorum, a plant-eating dinosaur that lived roughly 100 million years ago. It weighs around 70 tonnes and measures 38 meters in length.
"Patagotitan is the largest known creature to have walked our planet and is more than 15 times heavier than our very own herbivore ornithopod dinosaur Muttaburrasaurus, and more than 20 meters longer than the Queensland Humpback Whale in the Whale Mall at the Cultural Precinct," said Queensland Museum Network CEO Jim Thompson on Thursday.
"The scale and size of this dinosaur are astonishing, and visitors will discover just how challenging it was to fit the skeleton of Patagotitan into the exhibition space when they measure up beside these prehistoric creatures," he added.
Moreover, other fascinating dinosaurs will also be on display at the exhibition, such as the giant 6-tonne carnivore Tyrannotitan chubutensis, which was the ferocious predator of the Cretaceous period, and the world's smallest dinosaur Manidens condorensis at just 75 centimeters tall.
The exhibition will run until Oct. 2. ■