Sneak peek at Dinosaurs of Patagonia exhibition in Wellington

From this weekend, New Zealanders will have the opportunity to get up close with some of the giants of our past at Te Papa.

The Dinosaurs of Patagonia exhibition showcases 3D scanned casts of a dozen dinosaur skeletons from the South American region and multiple fossils, including one of the largest dinosaur bones ever found.

The Patagotitan's 2.4 metre long thigh bone was found in 2012 by Aurelio Hernández, a worker on a ranch who was searching for lost sheep with his dog.

"He was looking for a lost sheep and he suddenly found a round rock and he thought that it was those rounded rocks that they use to play bocce, like Italian bowling," Museo Paleontológico (Museum of Paleontology) Egidio Feruglio spokesperson Flo Gigena told 1News.

"So he started to dig up that rock and suddenly he realised that it was a massive bone. So he called us and that round tip was the tip of the femur... that you can actually see in the exhibition, not only in the giant cast but the original fossil."

Gigena travels the world with the models created by the museum, along with a team of installers.

"Fossils in Argentina are a state property, they are property of the national government.

"So it's quite an issue to bring these such fossils here to New Zealand and it's a quite a logistics challenge - they are so, so heavy, only the thigh bone weighs almost 700 kilos, only that bone, so it was a great challenge," she said.

"It was amazing work with two teams, two different museums in two different corners of world, so that's great about museums... how they work together, how they learn from each other and how they join efforts to entertain and to educate their audiences and Te Papa is a great example of that."

Te Papa exhibition preparator Ian Ruxton said he's feeling relieved to be at this point.

"We've really had to focus on that planning side of things for six months and just to get everything into the building.

"There are 100 crates in total over six containers and so over three days we had two a day, emptying them, bringing them up here into our storage area and storing them and then putting them in order," he said.

Te Papa has created New Zealand content for the exhibition too, exploring our history with dinosaurs.

"We don't really have many dinosaurs here but what we do have, we do show and on top of that we sort of explain a little bit what the links are between what we've seen Patagonia and what New Zealand probably would have been like," Te Papa curator Felix Marx said.

The exhibit takes guests through the timeline of the dinosaur age and budding palaeontologists can learn more through interactive activities.

"This is not an opportunity that's going to come around very often and I think to to get the full scale of the dinosaur evolution really is something that you know, that everyone should see," Marx said.

Tickets are on sale here and the exhibit will remain open from this Saturday until 28 April next year.