For the very first time, the world's largest-ever dinosaur is coming to New Zealand.
The Patagotitan, a creature which, on two legs, would be as high as the Auckland Harbour Bridge, will be visiting Te Papa later this year along with many other dinosaurs.
Buried in the deepest depths of a secret Te Papa compound, New Zealand's most precious biological finds can be found, including the Huia.
Te Papa's palaeontological department is in full stride at the moment, with The Dinosaurs of Patagonia exhibition stomping its way to Wellington in December.
With it, the world's largest ever dinosaur, the Patagotitan...
“It's basically taking up the whole diagonal length of the room, so it's gonna be a real moment when you come around the corner, and you have that reveal, and there's Patagotitan, giant,” said Te Papa Palientoligist Felix Marx.
“And they don't even know if that one they've pieced together from a few different fossils finds is as big as they can get; they don't think it was fully grown.”
But this is no exotic display of otherworldly curios - these creatures are, shockingly, home-grown.
“In New Zealand, we have this idea that basically nothing much happened around this era.
“But that's not entirely true,” Marx said.
Dinosaurs are harder to find in New Zealand, but with enough fossicking, they can be dug up.
“They were here, which is not that well known,” he said.
“No it's not well known at all. In fact, it was Joan Wiffen who proved to the scientific community that we did indeed have dinosaurs here in Aotearoa.
“She was a self-trained, very interested, very enthusiastic lady who came at this and said it can't possibly be that New Zealand doesn't have any dinosaurs, and she went, and she looked and lo and behold, she found them.”
We had a relative of Patagotitan right here in Aotearoa.
South America, where the exhibition is coming from, was once connected to New Zealand - the dinosaurs at the exhibition, in many ways, our own.
“It's really exciting to have this particular exhibition because it hints at the type of dinosaurs we would have had in Aotearoa in the deep past,” Marx said.
“Now, with this exhibition, you can actually get a sense of what these animals were really like. You get a whole variety of them, you get the full-sized models.
“Dinosaurs sort of fit into that rare space where they're fantastical, but they're also real. They literally existed.”
And, as it turns out, they still do. You see them every day - and we have heaps of them.
The birds that fly above our heads are the ancestors of ancient dinosaurs.
“It is true, biologically, it's totally true. Birds evolved from dinosaurs, they nested within dinosaurs, so all birds are dinosaurs,” Marx said.
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