Next Sunday, there is a must see programme for bone and dinosaur lovers. Ben Garrod and Sir David Attenborough are two of the most amazing presenters, and now they are doing a TV programme together. It will be called Attenborough And The Giant Dinosaur and it will be on BBC One on Sunday the 24th of January at 6:30pm.
Apart from being a great bit of TV, there is a bit of a personal connection for me. As you probably remember, in December 2014 I was on The One Show with Sir David. It was one of the best moments of my life, as I have always wanted to meet him. When I was on the One Show sofa, they showed a pre-recorded piece of Ben and I analysing bones at Bristol Museum. Ben also presented a brilliant BBC TV series called Secrets of BONES, which I wrote about here, and has been a great inspiration to me (we first met at the Grant Museum in London) .Read on to find out more about the dig !
In 2014, a shepherd in Argentina went out to look for a lost sheep and saw the tip of a bone sticking out of the earth. This turned out to be a 2.4 metre long femur, which is the longest ever found. When palaeontologists at the Egidio Feruglio Paleontology Museum in Argentina heard about this, they set up a dig at the site - which turned into the largest dinosaur dig site in 100 years.
By the end of the dig, they had found about 220 bones that came from seven different dinosaurs, and beside the bones were about 80 carnivorous teeth from an unknown killer. They found a new species of titanosaur, a giant plant-eating dinosaur, a sauropod.
Estimates show that this dinosaur weighed around 70 tons and was about 10% bigger than the biggest known dinosaur, so this is now the biggest dinosaur ever found. They had column like legs, and they walked on their tiptoes, with huge fleshy pads on their feet, like elephants.
For the next two years, Sir David has been at the dig sights, watching the cleaning and examining of the bones, and seeing what scientists think the animal would have looked like, and got help from Ben in doing so. At the end of the show, the unravel what the complete 37m skeleton would have looked like ! Make sure you watch it ! In the meantime, here's a piece by Ben Garrod in today's Observer about the programme.
Attenborough and the Giant Dinosaur is on BBC1, Sunday 24 Jan at 6.30pm
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