From 15cm egg to 57-ton beast, the patagotitan is jaw-dropping

THE odds of survival aren’t great — just one in a hundred — but the rewards are superlative: a chance to be one of the largest animals to walk the earth. That is what it was like being born a patagotitan, the star of the Natural History Museum’s exhibition on titanosaurs.

- Robbie Smith

Patagotitan young were as minuscule as the mature adults were gigantic. Freshly hatched from a 15cm egg, they weighed as much as a human baby. Fully grown they were 57 tons. Put another way, the little vegetarian hatchlings had to increase their bodyweight by an awe-inspiring 16,000 times. That’s a lot of ferns to munch.