By Della Hasselle
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
UPPER WEST SIDE — Over 60 million years ago, giant beasts half the length of a football field lumbered through forests and ravines, eating up to 1,150 pounds of food a day.
Called sauropods, the world's largest dinosaurs grew as large as 150-feet long and roamed the Earth for over 140 million years. Now they're back, in a brand-new exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History that opens Saturday.
The World's Largest Dinosaurs exhibit shows to-scale renderings of these massive animals, which experts estimate were as large as four city buses lined up end-to-end. The highlight of the exhibit is its centerpiece, a life-sized, detailed model of a 60-foot Mamenchisaurus, a type of sauropod.
"I love it, 'cause it's cool," Andrew Barreras, 8, said at a preview Thursday afternoon as he gazed at the dinosaur. "That's awesome, that a juvenile dinosaur can weigh up to 22,629 pounds."
At a preview opening, kids in the museum's Science and Nature Program had a blast exploring other hands-on stations that showed lifelike models of sauropod vertebrae, skin impressions, giant femurs and excavation dig pits.
The sauropods, whose name means "lizard-footed," were gentle giants who subsisted on plant matter and included dinosaurs like the Brachiosaurus. Their bones have been found at excavation sites as close as Wyoming, in the 1930s.
"It's very cool, because you get to learn lots of stuff, like what kind of dinosaurs there were. They're gigantic," Merrill Eastman, 7, said, adding that her favorite part was seeing what the inside of a giant sauropod egg looked like.
In addition to dinosaur models, the exhibit also features data put together by a slew of scientists that attempts to explain how the behemoth beasts lived their daily existence.
A team of 35 to 40 people including animal nutritionists, medical physiologists, and experts in materials science put together facts and figures to explain how animals of that size managed to support themselves in the world's ecosystem during the Triassic and Jurassic eras.
"The team gives us tremendous insight into the biology of sauropods," said Mark Norell, chair of the Division of Paleontology at the Museum and curator of The World’s Largest Dinosaurs.
"We wanted to do a dinosaur exhibition steeped in current science that no one has done before, and the topic of scaling and gigantism seemed natural. People will come away with a deep understanding of these animals as they were alive."
Through the exhibit, visitors can see a model of a sauropod's lungs and heart to help understand why the massive animal required 630 quarts of blood and 174 pints of air a day.
A giant box of model plants also puts the extinct animals' eating patterns into perspective, showing that the vegetarian dinosaur required over 1,000 plants a day just to survive.
The exhibit "gives center stage to some of he most fascinating and stupendously large dinosaurs that ever walked the Earth, in all their biological complexity and significance," Ellen V. Futter, the museum's president, added.
"The World’s Largest Dinosaurs" opens Saturday at the American Museum of Natural History at 200 Central Park West and 81st Street and is scheduled to run until Jan. 2, 2012.
