He lived in Patagonia almost 100 million years ago and ate 130 kilograms of vegetation a day: a cast of one of the largest dinosaurs on Earth has been exhibited since Friday in London, for the first time in Europe, reports AFP.

The skeleton of a 37.2-meter animal – a titanosaur named Patagotitan mayorum, “Patagonian Titan” – entered the exhibition hall of the Natural History Museum in London. If its neck were raised, the dinosaur would have been the size of a five-story building, researchers say.

A copy of the Titanosaurus resides in the same hall of the museum, where until 2017 the popular “Dippy”, the famous diplodocus model, was exhibited.

The removal of Dippy, the dinosaur that had been on display in the museum’s main hall since 1979, caused a wave of grief among museum visitors, who launched a “Save Dippy” petition. It was replaced by the skeleton of a blue whale named “Hope”.

The new skeleton on display is a replica of one of six titanosaurs, one of the largest dinosaurs to ever walk the earth, discovered after an Argentine farmer noticed a huge bone sticking out of the ground in 2010. Excavations continued until 2015.

“They discovered a cemetery with six different animals in the ground,” Paul Barrett, the exhibition’s lead researcher, told AFP.

“Over the course of about three years, they excavated all these bones and were able to discover that they had discovered a new type of giant dinosaur, one of the largest animals to ever walk the earth,” he said.

Mysterious death

The discovered dinosaurs lived in the forests of modern Patagonia 95-100 million years ago, during the late Cretaceous period.

According to research, these giant herbivores weighed about 57 tons, had a huge neck and a long tail. They had to eat 130 kilograms of vegetation per day to sustain themselves.

Scientists believe that all six animals died at the same time, but they do not know why.

“We don’t know why they died (…) Perhaps they were swept away by a flood. Or they could have been killed by another environmental problem, such as drought,” Barrett said, adding that research is ongoing.

After the discovery in Argentina, experts 3D scanned each dinosaur to create polyester resin and fiberglass replicas, which were then mounted on a steel frame.

It took a Canadian company more than six months to make the giant cast using dozens of fossilized bones from the site.

The real bones would be too heavy to display, but the fact that they are replicas means that visitors can touch the cast.

The replica arrived in London in 32 separate boxes, which meant “every piece had to be put together like a giant puzzle,” said Sinead Marron of the Natural History Museum.

She said the aim of the exhibition is “to tell the story of how such an animal grew from a tiny egg, smaller than a football, to this amazing 57-tonne giant”.