Attenborough and the Giant Dinosaur (2016) - full transcript

I'm here in Patagonia in the southern

part of South America because,

a few years ago, a man looking

for one of his lost sheep found

a simply gigantic bone

sticking out of a rock -

a bone that was going

to astonish science.

That first bone led to the

discovery of over 200 others.

They were all huge - so big that they

could only have come from a dinosaur.

And what a dinosaur it

would turn out to be!

One that seems to defy

the laws of nature.

These bones are part of a

skeleton that has remained hidden

and marvellously preserved

for 100 million years.

An international team of

scientists assembled to try

and work out what sort of

dinosaur it belonged to.

It's like a palaeontological

crime scene!

Each bone is an important piece

of evidence that can give us

information as to what the living

creature was actually like.

We'll use the latest

forensic technology,

we'll compare it with how

giant animals live today

and we'll build a full-size skeleton

of this stupendous creature.

And we will try and work out in detail

what it looked like when it was alive.

Absolutely amazing!

Could it really have been the biggest

animal ever to walk the earth?

ATTENBOROUGH AND THE GIANT DINOSAUR

Patagonia in southern Argentina.

Like many detective stories,

this one began by chance.

A shepherd stumbled across the tip of

a huge bone poking out of the ground.

Experts from Patagonia's

premier palaeontological museum

confirmed it was part of a dinosaur.

But they didn't realise at the time what a

truly extraordinary one it would prove to be.

Dinosaurs of many kinds roamed all over these

lands in the southern end of South America

during what's known as

the Cretaceous period,

between 66 and 145 million years ago.

The largest were plant-eaters

known as sauropods.

And the largest of them

were the titanosaurs.

Giant titanosaur bones

are comparatively rare

so very little is known

about these dinosaurs.

This new discovery

could change all that.

Like many people, young and old,

I'm fascinated by dinosaurs,

so the chance to join this investigation

is just too good an opportunity to miss.

Oh, I'd love to have a go!

- I'm sure they'd let you.

Of course, it's the giants in particular

that capture the imagination.

The first sauropods to appear on earth

were comparatively small creatures.

This is the cast of the

thigh bone of one of them.

It's not even as big as my thigh bone.

But after about 20 million years,

some had become pretty big.

This is a thigh bone from

one of those creatures.

But then, after that...

our giant appeared.

This is its thigh bone.

It's the largest ever found.

Coming across such a bone in your

back yard must be quite a shock.

Just ask farm owner Alba Maio.

I don't have many sheep

but I do have dinosaur

We're surprised and shocked.

Apparently it's a unique

specimen of its size.

Before long, a whole team of fossil-hunting

scientists arrives and starts work.

The thighbone proves to be eight feet,

2,4 metres long.

It's preserved in extraordinary detail,

and detail will be

critical to the forensic

examination that will follow.

The research team soon turn

the site into a vast quarry.

It proves to be one of the biggest

dinosaur finds of the century.

Bone after bone emerge from the rocks.

We just found another bone right here.

We weren't expecting it at all.

We just start digging and find it.

Until recently, giant titanosaurs have

only been known from a dozen bones

and our team have already found

more than ten times as many.

Dr Diego Pol is the chief palaeontologist

leading the investigation.

If you really want to know what a really

gigantic dinosaur looked like, this quarry here

has the potential to answer that question

and that's really exciting for us.

It's really impressive. When you stand by

one of these bones, you really feel tiny.

With so much new evidence,

there is a chance of discovering

all kinds of new facts about

the mysterious titanosaurs.

It's like a palaeontological

crime scene.

It's a really unique thing that you will

not find anywhere else in the world.

Patagonia's harsh weather makes

uncovering the fossils exhausting,

but it also endangers the

newly-exposed fossils.

A lot of damage from the rain so we need

to protect the bones that are at risk.

I'm really concerned that

this already has some cracks.

If the bones aren't protected, tiny

details on their surface could be lost.

To protect the bones,

they're covered with, of all things,

wet toilet paper and plaster of Paris.

It's like putting a plaster

cast on a broken leg.

There's a rush to get them back to the museum

to begin examining them in minute detail.

A new road has been specially

built to enable them

to be transported

without too much jolting.

Once at the museum laboratory,

the detailed detective work begins.

It's a chance to start

putting flesh on bones.

Some really big muscle

was going in here.

This animal was so big

that it certainly needed

really powerful muscles and very

strong attachments into the bones.

This is a giant vertebra, one of the bones

of the spine, and it's a very important find.

That's because it's likely

to provide crucial evidence

for identifying the

species of our dinosaur.

Despite weighing up to half a tonne,

these fossils are surprisingly fragile.

It's all rather nerve-racking.

One bone like this has already

cracked in half without warning.

And so this is the

position as it was in life

with the centre of the backbone there,

then this is the crest on the top.

Right, right, and this belongs

to the middle part of the thorax.

Right about here.

- About that. - Yeah, yeah.

Many more weeks of detailed examination

will be needed before the backbones

reveal all their secrets.

Surprisingly, perhaps,

one of the first things

the team was able to deduce about

our titanosaur is its weight.

That's because,

after finding the thigh bone,

they discover another huge bone

from the front leg - a humerus.

By measuring the circumference

of each of these leg bones,

it's possible to estimate how

much weight they could support.

Let's see how much.

We'll measure this.

79.

- 79?

I'm not sure how that

translates to body weight.

Yeah, around 70 tonnes or even more,

probably.

That's really big.

- It's amazing.

That evening, Dr Jose Luis

Carballido checks his calculations.

I've been calculating how

heavy the dinosaur was.

It weighted more than Argentinosaurus!

Until now, Argentinosaurus was

the heaviest known dinosaur.

Ours already looks bigger.

Could this mean it was the largest

animal ever to walk the earth?

Could it also be a new species?

We can't be sure... yet.

The rocks of Patagonia,

so bare of vegetation,

also contain astonishing evidence of

how titanosaurs began their lives.

I've now come nearly 500 miles north

from our Patagonian dinosaur excavation

to a place called Auca Mahuevo.

This is the largest dinosaur

nesting ground yet discovered.

The remains of their eggs and

their nests are wherever I look.

In fact, it's quite difficult for me

to take a step without walking

on a dinosaur eggshell.

Over thousands of years, the wind and

the rain have cleared away the soft rock

that once enclosed these fragments

and they can tell us quite a lot

about how titanosaurs reproduced.

Careful excavation has

shown that these dinosaurs

laid eggs in clutches of

up to 30 or 40 at a time.

They would have looked

rather like these replicas

because they lay on the

surface of the ground,

not covered by soil,

but in a shallow depression.

Sometimes, though, remains of vegetation

have been found in some nests,

which suggests that the dinosaurs might have

used rotting leaves to help with the incubation.

The dinosaur that laid these

eggs here were medium-sized.

Our dinosaur that we're excavating,

probably laid eggs as big as that.

I'm shown around by Dr Luis Chiappe who, with

his team, discovered this remarkable site.

Dinosaur eggs here were

laid on an old river plain.

Then the river flooded and covered the

unhatched eggs, preserving them in mud.

You see, you know, many eggs...

- There.

for kilometres and kilometres.

Here's a nice one.

Oh, that's a huge piece!

- Yup.

And this is the actual surface of the egg?

- Yes.- Astounding.

Do you suppose they could have

been coloured like birds' eggs?

They may. Maybe they were off-white.

We can't tell really. - Yeah.

Well, we can see all the

tiny pores on the surface.

And the texture.

- Yeah. What a beautiful piece.

You must admit it's pretty romantic.

I think it's incredible.

- I think it's absolutely extraordinary

and I must put it back where I found it.

- Thank you.

The fragments could tell us quite a

lot about how the dinosaurs nested.

But some, amazingly,

can do even more than that.

All these examples have

something quite special.

This one is my favourite.

And what you can see

is a very large patch

of baby dinosaur skin.

How wonderful! It's extraordinary.

And this is not just an impression,

this is the mineralised skin. - It is.

Yeah. Astounding.

The eggs were not just

preserving the bones,

they were also preserving

the skin of these babies. - Yeah.

This was just on the surface. I remember

picking this up and brushing it a little bit

and then using my hand lens and

looking at this exact patch of skin

and I realised that

we had found something

that no person had ever seen before.

You are the first human being

ever to see a baby dinosaur's skin. - Yes.

It was just an amazing...

amazing moment.

It must have been very

close to hatching.

It's almost complete, this thing.

- Yes, that's what we believe.

And then a flood...

- Killed them all.

Unfortunately for them, good for us.

- Yes.

Luis Chiappe has dozens of

complete eggs in his museum and

he allows me to examine some of his

most precious specimens for myself.

There are many other remarkable things

in these astonishing time capsules.

This one has got,

perfectly clearly, the limb bones.

Here is a skull.

That's the orbit of the eye,

there's the lower jaw,

there's the snout.

This one also has a skull,

but on the tip of the snout you can

see a little spike which is like the

egg tooth that a bird embryo has to

help it crack itself out of a shell.

And here is a replica

of what the complete,

un-crushed shell must have looked like.

With all these details, it is possible to

imagine how a baby titanosaur entered the world.

To get an idea of how these

youngsters might have lived,

we can compare them with their

closest living relatives - birds.

Rather like baby ostriches,

a young titanosaur

would have been able to

walk soon after hatching.

They may well have gathered

into groups to give some safety

from predators, as young ostriches do.

Microscopic analysis of dinosaur leg

bones show rings, rather like tree rings,

and these indicate that titanosaurs

grew very swiftly early in their lives

and they could have lived for some 50

years, plenty of time to become enormous.

The team now has 150

bones of our titanosaur,

enough to get an idea, not only of its

weight, but also its height and length.

Now, the plan is to build a life-size

reproduction of the complete skeleton.

It's a challenge to find a place

big enough to house an animal that's

four times longer than a London

bus and nearly twice its height.

But Diego thinks he's found one.

It's an old wool warehouse.

One, two, three, four,

five, six, seven...

We have been looking for a place that

is big enough to fit our dinosaur.

This seems to be it.

This is a warehouse that we could use,

not only in terms of the length,

this is 70 metres long,

but also it's very important

in terms of the height.

So we need a place not only long,

but really high.

It really needs a little bit of

decoration, but I think it will do it.

It's going to be awesome!

Putting the skeleton

together will help us

understand the particular

challenges of being such a giant.

So, next, an international team

of skeleton builders arrive

to scan the bones ready to make a

3-D computer model of each of them.

3-D scanning,

accurate to 0.01 of a millimetre,

allows images of the bones to be

placed in a virtual reality world

so that they can now be

examined from all points of view

without needing eight

people to lift them.

One of the mysteries

surrounding our dinosaur is,

how could an animal as big as

it was actually move about?

The computer data allows us to put

our dinosaur leg bones together in 3-D

and then compare the arrangement with

what we know about living animals.

Elephants are the largest

land animal alive today.

They, like titanosaurs,

have to move their massive bodies around

without their bones shattering

under the enormous weight.

I've come to meet Professor John

Hutchinson here at ZSL Whipsnade Zoo.

He's studied elephants for many

years and has joined the team

that's investigating the internal

workings of our titanosaur.

We have about a one-metre long

pressure sensitive mat out there

with several thousand sensors in

it and it's telling us, in very

high resolution, what the pressure

on an elephant's foot is like.

We can see on the

elephant's foot here...

Here she goes... - Yeah! Great.

- That was a perfect one! - Bull's-eye!

The pressure hits the ground, rolls over

and then pushes off with its toenails.

So we can see there some hot colours,

or reds and oranges,

on the toenails of Melvin's

foot indicating high pressure.

And then some cooler colours back towards

the heel pad in the greens and light blue.

That's low pressure. So elephants are supporting

most of their weight on their toenails.

That pressure gets transmitted

up to their toe bones

and then up to their wrists

and ankles and so forth.

John's analysis suggests that our

titanosaur's legs, like those of an elephant,

were placed vertically beneath the

body like strong, massive columns.

This arrangement transmits

the weight to the toes

and then spreads the force, using fatty

pads in the back feet, as shock absorbers.

But our titanosaur had one other adaptation

to help them walk - one that elephants lack.

A clue to this can be seen

on the giant thighbone.

How's it going?

- Good, good.

Ben Garrod specialises in

reconstructing skeletons

and he's joining the team to

look at the bones in detail.

Marks on them show clearly

where the muscles were attached.

That's halfway down the femur,

isn't it, that big lump there... - Yes.

for these massive muscle and,

I guess, tendon attachments?

This lump is where a huge muscle

was attached to the femur.

The other end of this muscle was

connected to bones like these in the tail.

It's this connection that

helped our dinosaur to walk.

They've got so much strength

and so much rigidity up there.

They actually used their tails to

help move, to help their propulsion.

So they had massive muscles and tendons from...

- Help...?

Yes, so the movement of the tail

actually pulled the hind legs

backwards and then raised them forwards.

- I see.

I must try that sometime!

The largest lizard alive today, the

Komodo dragon, has a similar adaptation.

The swing of their tail helps their

back legs move more efficiently.

Of course, our dinosaur was different,

not least because it

weighed over 500 times more.

And that makes John Hutchinson

suspect that it would have

had to deal with another problem -

one also faced by passengers

on long-haul flights.

Pressure in the legs of big

animals is a really big problem.

If blood stays down there too long,

it's going to pool and clot.

Much like airline socks that humans use,

large animals,

again and again,

have evolved very thick elastic skin

around their lower limb that helps

to keep that pressure very high.

Actually, I can empathise. I have to wear

those same kind of stockings to get my blood

back up my long legs!

Time to thank our helpful elephant.

You're a lovely thing. Yes, you...

Oh, you want one! OK, in you go.

Thanks. Thanks, pal.

That's all I've got!

A giant animal like an elephant also needs

a huge heart to pump blood around its body.

And so did our titanosaur.

Its heart must have been immense.

From our new, detailed knowledge

of the skeleton, John Hutchinson

has calculated that it was more

than six feet in circumference.

It probably weighed 230 kilos

and would have had to shift 90

litres of blood with a single beat.

There's one!

And it would have had to repeat

that beat every five seconds.

There it goes again.

Weighing more than three grown men,

it would have been

extraordinarily powerful.

And in order to pump blood

around the body at high pressure

and then into the delicate

lungs at a lower pressure,

it's thought that our titanosaur's

heart had four chambers -

more like that of a bird than a reptile.

So, a powerful heart pumped the

blood to the extremities of the body,

but how did the blood get back?

As in an elephant,

a combination of fatty footpads

and tight skin are thought to have

forced the blood from its legs...

all the way back to its heart.

Toronto, Canada, and the world's

biggest dinosaur-making factory.

The team is building a life-size

skeleton of this vast creature

to be unveiled in Diego's warehouse

in Argentina in six months' time.

First, they have to turn all the information

from the 3-D scans into each individual bone.

State-of-the-art robots

carve moulds from polystyrene

so that the bones can

be cast in fibreglass.

Up until now, the fossil bones

have been the main focus of the dig

but the rock that surrounds the fossils

also holds important information.

The nature of the layers of rock in

which these fossils lie can tell us

a great deal about how they got to be

where they are and how old they are.

Some of these layers are

volcanic ash which must have come

from a volcano erupting every now and

then somewhere in the neighbourhood.

And this ash around the bones can

tell us how old the fossils are.

Scientists worked out

that all these fossils

dated from the Cretaceous

period but better than that,

they dated them precisely

to 101,6 million years old.

By a detailed forensic examination

and comparisons with living creatures,

the team have deduced a great deal

about the life of our titanosaur.

We now know when it lived,

how big it was,

how it moved and what its

young might have looked like.

We've even calculated its heart rate.

In an investigation of this scale,

sometimes the most important

information comes not from the most eye-catching

evidence but from quite tiny details.

Here is something that I really hoped

the excavation was going to find.

It's a tooth.

And it's tiny compared with the size

of the huge animals from which it came.

Teeth can tell you a huge

amount about an animal.

And if you look at the tip,

you can see that it has been

worn into two facets on either side.

And that tells us that this tooth

engaged with the teeth on the other

side in an alternate way like that,

not head-on but one on either side.

So this animal, like a pair of scissors,

just nipped off the vegetation

on which it was feeding.

Enormous though it was, just nipped

off little leaves and here are fossils

of some of the different kinds of

plants on which it might have fed...

cycads, ferns and conifers.

One thing these plants have in common

is that they're all very

fibrous and hard to digest.

To get enough nutrients

from such poor quality foods

our titanosaur would have had

to eat them in vast quantities.

A descendent of one of these plants

still grows in Patagonia today.

200 million years ago when

South America, Australia

and Antarctica were all joined together

to form a supercontinent called Gondwana,

a particular kind of vegetation

was dominant - they were conifers.

They continued to survive

to 100 million years ago

when our titanosaurs were

roaming the land and a few still

survive today. Here in the foothills

of the Andes is one of them.

The monkey puzzle tree called araucaria.

Trees, like araucaria, show that the

dinosaurs must have had another problem.

These conifers, apart from being poor-quality

fodder, can grow to over 130 feet in height.

They would have been out of reach for

many animals but not our titanosaur.

Here, boys, come on.

It's pretty clear why a long neck

is useful for a land-living animal.

It enables it to reach vegetation

which is growing high up

at the top trees that other

ground-based animals couldn't reach

and it must have been much

the same for titanosaur,

except we know from the fossils that

titanosaur's neck was very, very much longer.

And that enabled it to sweep

its head in a great wide arc

and even to reach between two

tree trunks that happened to be

growing close together

to get other vegetation.

What about that?

This enormous reach would have saved

our titanosaur a lot of energy.

It only needed to move its neck to feed,

not its whole body.

But how did it eat enough of this

poor-quality food to survive?

Elephants face a

similar challenge today.

An elephant can collect

and chew about 130 kilos -

that's 300 pounds of

vegetation in a day.

But our titanosaur could have

eaten five times that amount.

It's been estimated that a large

titanosaur would eat enough

plant material to fill

a skip in a single day.

So how did they digest it all?

Elephants solved the

problem by giving their food

long preparatory chews but

titanosaurs didn't bother.

They simply gathered leaves by nipping

them off and then swallowing them whole.

But that in turn would mean

that they needed a bigger

and longer gut to digest

all that unchewed food.

And it might well have taken ten days

for food to pass through their system.

A bigger gut needs a bigger body so

titanosaurs grew bigger and bigger

until they approached the limits

of what their bones could support.

Two years after the dig began,

a strange cargo arrives,

having made a 7,000 mile

journey from Canada.

Dozens of packing cases later and all the

bones are finally in Diego's warehouse.

Assembling the skeleton

can finally begin.

The 3-D data used to make the skeleton has

also been used to create a computer model.

It means I can get a preview of what

the final skeleton will look like.

The first thing is these very,

very lovely legs.

If we turn it around, they are very, very

column-like and this is like elephants

but interestingly this titanosaur

had slightly splayed legs,

at an angle of about five degrees

and this slight change would have

really increased the ability

to take all that extra weight.

You see the splay because of the joint or

because of the shape of the bone? - Both.

You can tell from the shape of

the bone and from where certain

parts of the bones form and how

they sit and then how the bones fit

with one another you can really tell

how it would have sat in real life.

Another thing you can see is a very,

very long neck.

And we just found out that

ours had 15 bones in its neck.

Interestingly, some of them were five

or six times longer than they were wide.

These incredibly long vertebrae and there's lots

of them. - Why does it have such a long tail?

Well, a couple of reasons.

If you've got an animal this big with

a neck this long, the last thing

you want to be is top-heavy.

And CAN research has just shown

that the centre of gravity

in this animal was somewhere right

in the middle of the chest cavity.

So the heavy tail counterbalances

the exceedingly long neck.

But judging from the size of the muscle

attachments, the tail was also immensely strong.

It had huge muscles from around

here right down to about a third

of the way down the tail,

somewhere around here.

So that would be solid flesh?

- Yep, muscle tissue, other tissue,

ligaments, tendons.

- Do you think they might have fought with it?

Possibly. - Thrashing it about?

- It could've been used as a defence mechanism

so you're walking up to that as

a predator, the last thing you

want to be is on the receiving end.

- Don't put me into it!

Yeah.

The long and painstaking examination

of the backbone has now borne fruit

and Ben has got some important news.

This is a vertebrae here from right high up

in the back, right near the shoulder blades.

And the most important thing is

this little ridge that ends in this

big lump and this is only found

in this particular dinosaur

so from that and a few

other physical differences,

we think we have got a brand-new,

exciting species.

So our titanosaur is not only a giant,

it is indeed a new species of dinosaur.

Examining the spinal bones also reveal something

about how it coped with life as a giant.

This is where the spinal

cord would have passed.

So this hole straight through here?

- Mm-hm.

The whole nerve centre,

as it were, - Yep

the cable carrying all the nerves.

- From the base of the tail

right to the skull. - It's very small.

- It is, yeah. - Ours is what?

About thumb width.

- So it's not all that much bigger. - No.

This cord was well over 100 feet long.

It would have taken about a second for a nerve

impulse to go from its tail to its brain.

And what's more,

the spine has revealed another surprise.

It is full of holes,

rather like a Swiss cheese.

The neck bones of titanosaurs

contain so many holes

and spaces that they

weighed around 35% less than

they would have done had

they been made of solid bone.

The leg bones of modern

birds are much the same.

And those spaces serve another

very important function.

They contained air sacs.

These air sacs were

connected with the lungs.

So what was their function

and how did they work?

They occupied much of the chest

and ran along the whole length

of the body along the backbone

to the 17-metre-long neck

and then to the head.

It's thought the balloon-like sacs

had thin but strong membranes.

These sacs acted like bellows,

forcing air into the lungs.

When we breathe in,

air flows down into our lungs,

oxygen is absorbed in exchange

for carbon dioxide which is then

got rid of when we breathe out.

The air sac system is very much more

complex but very much more efficient.

It enabled a titanosaur to

take in oxygen continuously,

not just when breathing in

but also when breathing out.

Our titanosaur wasn't the

only giant living around here.

This was a dangerous world,

where meat-eaters were giants too.

New evidence from the dig site shows that

carnivorous dinosaurs were here as well.

So these are some of the over 80

teeth we found on the dig site.

And you can feel how sharp they are.

Yes, it's serrated, just like a shark's tooth,

in fact. - Absolutely.

They actually belong to a family

known as a shark-toothed dinosaurs.

We can identify the teeth

at the family level.

We know of one species that

belonged to that family,

it's called Tyrannotitan chubutensis.

- Tyrannotitan? - Yeah.

That means a ferocious giant, ferocious beast.

- Exactly. - Good name.

Yeah. - Chubutensis is because

of the area it comes from?

Yes, this is the Chubut province.

- Great.

Tyrannotitan must have been

a ferocious-looking beast.

With large eyes, sharp,

flesh-eating teeth...

and strong legs, it was a fast,

alert, meat-eating dinosaur.

And it was as big as T Rex.

- Really? Not as famous.

Not as famous.

- Tell that to Hollywood.

I have some bones over there

I would like to show you.

So this is one of the tail

vertebrae we found at the dig site.

There's something really interesting

here. You can see this groove?

Well,

this groove was probably a bite mark

made by one of the carnivores.

- By one of these teeth?

Right.

- So it was... What do you mean? Like that?

Exactly. Taking the flesh out of their tail.

- Really? - Yeah.

The tender bits.

They would be too.

- Yeah, absolutely.

Can you determine whether it was

a scavenger or it was a hunter?

We don't know if they were dead,

I mean, they were scavenging

on the carcasses, or if they were

actually hunting and killing them.

Well, it didn't make much

difference to the old dinosaur. - Yes.

In a detective story, to close the case,

you really want to know

how the victim met its end.

If our titanosaur didn't perish in the

jaws of a Tyrannotitan, how did it die?

Clues can be found by the

detailed three-dimensional mapping

of the location of every fossil bone,

small and large.

That shows that the dig site

contains the remains of not just one

but seven different individuals.

All of the new species.

And the first thing to notice is that

they are on three different levels.

That's to say the animals must have come

here on at least three different occasions.

But why should they have done that?

There are several theories

as to why seven bodies

should have all ended up at

this one particular place.

The first is that this was a seasonal

climate and that as the dry season proceeded

this was one of the last

remaining pools of water

and when this went, the sauropods

that happened to be here died here.

The second is that these bodies

were swept down by great rivers

during the rainy season and then where the

land levelled out, so those bodies were dumped.

Analysis of the sediments around the

bones shows that there were rivers

gently flowing across this site

at the time of their death.

There was no shortage of water to drink.

What's more the rivers were not moving

fast enough to shift such huge bodies.

So the corpses weren't washed

here by floodwaters either.

Could there be another reason why they all

died in one place on three different occasions?

We know from layers of ash

around the bones that there were

volcanoes erupting in the neighbourhood

so doubtless there were

areas where the ground was

warmed by volcanic fumes,

just as they are here today.

We also know that dinosaurs regularly

laid their eggs in such places,

doubtless taking advantage of the volcanic

warmth to help incubate their eggs.

So maybe that was the reason why they

kept returning to the same place.

Certainly the excavation of the

dinosaur egg site seems to support this.

Nests like these have been found at four

quite widely separated layers in the rocks,

showing that dinosaurs came back

to this particular site again

and again and again over

a long period of time.

Ash from a volcanic eruption can

sometimes fall in such quantities

that the whole vegetation is

blanketed by it and killed.

So life in the aftermath of a big eruption

can be very difficult for a plant-eater.

Whatever the explanation, individuals

over several generations came

to this one place and died here.

The dig is coming to an end and the team have

assembled a record-breaking number of bones

but they're still hoping to find one

last piece of the puzzle - the skull.

So what number's this, 203?

- Actually this is 223. - 23?

Between the seven individuals?

- Yeah.

Between all the seven

individuals we found here on this site.

If these are neck vertebrae,

could they be leading towards a skull?

Yes, that's what were hoping for. We just

found another neck vertebrae over there.

That would be a great triumph if

you found a skull, wouldn't it?

There are only three titanosaur

skulls known so far. - Really? - Yeah.

So they're very rare.

- And that's because they're very fragile.

They're very delicate bones

and they have

very light sutures

between each of the bones.

OK, well, let's hope you find number four.

- Yeah. - Could be under there.

Could be. We're going for that.

- Wonderful.

Alas, it was not to be.

So I gather you haven't yet found the skull.

- Sadly not.

The only thing we have found

out of the skull is his tooth.

So to complete the skeleton,

the team have to reconstruct one...

Take that piece out of there. - Basing it

on the three skulls of other titanosaur species

to produce one which most suits

the single tooth that we have.

The scientific team has discovered,

collected, cleaned,

scanned and copied 220

bones of our giant.

Soon it'll be possible to put those

copies together to get some idea

of what the living animal

actually looked like.

But the fossil bones themselves

still have many secrets

that are waiting to be revealed.

All the theory can now

be put to the test.

We can finally get the most accurate estimate

of our dinosaur's weight and true size.

It takes two weeks, working day and

night, to fit all the bones together.

God!

Absolutely amazing!

Good gracious!

Well, Diego, are you pleased with it?

- Yes, we are very pleased.

It is been a lot of work, it has

taken 40,000 man-hours to get here

but we're really, really happy with it.

And does it answer some of your

questions about the animal?

Yeah, absolutely.

It answers a lot of questions

but the good thing is it

raises more questions.

So we have a lot of research

to continue on this animal.

It's clear that this thing

still wasn't fully grown.

It's massive, but it still had room to go.

- You mean the structure of the bones looks as

though they were still growing?

- Yeah.

That raises the really big question,

is it the biggest so far discovered?

Well, according to our estimate,

this animal weighed 70 metric tonnes.

70 metric tonnes.

What would that compare with?

That is like 15 African elephants.

- 15 African elephants?

We are now sure that this animal

was 10% larger than Argentinosaurus.

The previous record-holder?

- The previous record-holder. So, yes,

we think we have the largest

dinosaur ever known. - Fantastic!

I can quite believe it.

Congratulations to you.

- Thank you. - Congratulations to he, she or it.

Wonderful!

A marvellous, marvellous thing!

Piecing this complex jigsaw puzzle

together has been a fascinating adventure.

It all started with the discovery

of one enormous thighbone.

And then a team of 40 worked

for over two years to excavate

and put together the near-complete skeleton

of the largest land animal yet discovered.

And so added one further marvel

to the astonishing

history of life on earth.

What a thrill it must have been

to see it when it was alive.