Attenborough and the Giant Dinosaur

Like many people, I love David Attenborough documentaries and I was really excited to watch this. Within this documentary it shows a creature found in Argentina, that lived 100million years ago. It's also the largest animal to ever walk the Earth, a new species of plant eating dinosaur - the Titanosaur.
This creature had a 2.4m long thigh bone, weighed 70 metric tons, and it had a total length of 37m. This huge creature had an unusually small spinal cord. Ours its about a thumbs width and as you can see from the image above, it's not that much bigger. This would mean that it would take 1 whole second for information to go from its tail to its brain.

The scientists looked at living animals to study how they coped with being so large. Todays largest land animal is the Elephant, they hold their weight on their toe nails and have fatty pads in their feet to be used as shock absorbers. Large animals have a problem with blood circulation, Elephants combat this by having thick, tight and elastic skin on their legs to keep pressure high, to push the blood back up their legs to make sure theres no blood clotting. They also hold their legs directly underneath the body, like columns to hold their weight.  
The Titanosaur's heart was extremely powerful, it had to be, to be able to pump blood around this massive creature. The heart itself, had a 6 foot circumference and weighed 230 kilos. It would beat every 5 seconds and with every beat, pump 90 litres of blood around the body.

A creature this huge needs a lot of energy and food. The Titanosaur would eat plants that were hard to digest, they would eat huge amounts and take around 10 days to digest it. They would need to eat enough to fill a skip everyday.
The neck bones in the Titanosaur's had lots of hole in them, these holes made the weight of their neck 35% less than it would of if it was made from solid bone. Along with their huge tail, that helped to counter balance the weight of their neck.

This creature wasn't fully grown, its bones showed signs that it was still growing and it is already 10% larger than the previous record holder of largest animal to walk the Earth.
Overall I loved this documentary and I have learned so many things about this creature and how other creatures work to support their huge weight. A lot of the information I've learned I can use to help me create large creatures that can support their own body weight much like how these extinct creatures can, and living ones today like the Elephant.