‘Bigger than anything I’ve seen’: Australian Museum to host the largest dinosaur to walk the Earth

Only a couple of Sydney-born institutions have reached the 200-year milestone. These include Australia Post, the NSW Supreme Court, Westpac Bank and the Royal Botanic Garden Sydney. The Herald will join the prestigious list in 2031, while the Australian Museum, founded in 1827, will do so next year.

To celebrate, the museum will bring the skeleton of the biggest dinosaur to have roamed the Earth into its famed exhibition halls over the summer.

At almost 38 metres long, Patagotitan mayorum is a colossal prehistoric giant that ruled Argentina’s Patagonia during the Cretaceous period about 100 million years ago.

Local laws prevent the whole skeleton from leaving Patagonia, so a moulded cast will be sent, along with an original fossil thigh – the largest dinosaur fossil bone ever found, according to Australian Museum chief executive Kim McKay.

“It will take up the entire length, virtually, of our touring exhibition hall down in the basement,” McKay said. “I had never seen anything as big, and I’ve always been a bit of a dinosaur fanatic.

“It is estimated to have weighed an extraordinary 70 tonnes when it had its flesh on it … there have been some other recent finds of dinosaurs in that field, but they’ve only found small fragments of bones that could indicate there could have even been a bigger one. But at the moment, this is definitely the world’s biggest [dinosaur].”

Patagotitan’s skeleton will lead an exhibition cast of dinosaurs from across the mountainous region displayed at the Australian Museum, which opens in November as part of a year-long program marking the AM’s 200th anniversary.

McKay said leading the organisation through its 200th anniversary was “icing on the cake” of her 12-year tenure, and there was much to uncover about the period Sydney was in as it established many of its longest-running institutions.

“It’s just a blip in time, 200 years compared to [First Nations people’s] occupation and settlement of Australia – but it was interesting what started to evolve here,” she said.

“The emergence of the 1600s of the Enlightenment in the UK and Europe really played into that. And there was this sense of we can’t be a progressive society until we embrace learning and knowledge in a new way.”

Before the University of Sydney, McKay noted, the museum and State Library were the first places to establish a place for scientific knowledge in the city. But it’s always been charged with recording and researching new species as well as tracking what happens to them over time – a role she parallels with the Herald.

“[The Herald and the museum] have a lot in common in that way, our longevity, but also in storytelling. There’s a lovely link there because The Sydney Morning Herald has chronicled the story of this city, and many of those early stories were about what was happening at the museum.”

That history is even etched into its building, McKay said.

“The knowledge is ingrained. You see the patina of footprints on the floor, and how a stone hearth is worn away by footprints and so forth. The sandstone here evokes that period – convict labour, hand-hewn, that sandstone,” she said.

“The [current] building was started in 1845. It was finished in 1850, and the taxidermy lab was down in the basement next to the kitchen, and in those days, the director lived here with his family. This was a place where people lived, worked and developed.”

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