World's biggest dinosaur to be displayed in Chicago

The cast skeleton of the largest dinosaur discovered to date will go on exhibit in a recreation of what would have been its home in present day Argentine Patagonia at Chicago's Field Museum starting June 15.

The 37 m (122 ft) long cast, dubbed Maximo, occupies one third of the museum's Stanley Field Hall and its head pokes out from a balcony 8.54 m (28 ft) high, Efe reported.

Maximo is a long-necked mega-herbivore in the family of Titanosaurus.

"Our goal as an institution is to offer visitors the best possible dinosaur experiences, and we want that to start right when visitors first enter Stanley Field Hall," Field Museum president Richard Lariviere said in a statement.

"The new titanosaur is huge and it looks amazing in Stanley Field Hall. It is the perfect home to display the world's largest dinosaur," he said.

Maximo will not be alone.

Around the skeleton there will be floating gardens and life-size reproductions of a flock of giant flying reptiles, some of them 9.7 m long, the length of a school bus.

The Maximo model was created from the fossilized bones of seven individual dinosaurs of the same species excavated from a quarry near La Flecha, Argentina.

--IANS

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