Giants
I was excited to visit the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh to see a new exhibition called Giants. This features ten extinct mammals which existed tens of millions of years ago and are described as giants on account of their colossal size. These examples are the largest ever to have walked on the planet and are truly awe inspiring. The display consisted of a couple of complete skeletons, with the rest featuring part of their makeup, with the missing pieces filled in by using white coloured boxes to fill the space they would have occupied when alive.
The exhibition is not about dinosaurs, but features the mammals that survived after the meteorite impact which resulted in the demise of the dinosaurs. The ten featured are the largest discovered to date. There were other animal groups, such as snakes, turtles, sharks and birds that survived during this period, but the display focuses on those mammals that can be truly be described as giant.
One of the complete skeletons is a giant sloth from South America (Megatherium americanum) while the Mammuthus primigenius better known as the woolly mammoth, features the fossilised leg bone around which the boxes complete the picture of how it would have stood. It’s a good way of giving the impression of how large these mammals were when working with an incomplete skeleton. Details are provided on boards and there is a short film which runs on a continuous loop.
This is not an exhibition that requires putting aside a fair amount of time, given there are ten examples to view, so it is a fairly quick win if your time is limited. It is a fascinating exhibition made possible by the incredible work of palaeontologists and provides an insight to a field of study I knew little about.
If I was to choose a favourite, it probably is the Paraceratherium which is the largest land mammal ever discovered. A relation to the modern rhino, it is sometimes known as Indricotherium or Baluchitherium, and roamed the forests and grasslands of Asia and Eastern Europe 34 to 23 million years ago. It was a herbivore, and used its long neck in the same way a giraffe does to reach leaves at the tops of trees. It was approximately seven and a half to eight metres long, shoulder height almost five metres, its raised head reaching a height of eight metres and weighed between fifteen to twenty tonnes. A true giant. It’s hard to believe such mammals existed and grew to that size, but the research and effort that has gone into discovering what our planet was like before humans, gives us a chance to experience the variety and sheer scale of life as it existed then.
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