A titan in the air
Bones flown as airfreight from Buenos Aires to London Heathrow. The name is rather suitable for the primordial beast – Patagotitan mayorum. The skeleton of a giant dinosaur that lived in today’s Argentina crossed the Atlantic as belly freight in 40 crates recently. Now it will be exhibited in London’s Natural History Museum.
It’s not just children who we expect will be delighted with this logistics feat. One of the largest dinosaurs to walk the earth made its way from Buenos Aires (Argentina) to London Heathrow (England) recently. The fact that it was an airfreight shipment and not a passenger was because the Patagotitan mayorum, a Titanosaur, was transported as a skeleton.
IAG Cargo, the freight division of IAG, which was formed in 2011 by the merger of British Airways World Cargo and Iberia Cargo, took over the transport. The Titanosaur was as long as a British Airways Airbus A320 or – to use a London standard – four double-decker buses.
Titanosaurs – the biggest dinosaurs
The Museum of Natural History, which is located on Exhibition/Cromwell Road in South Kensington, London, chose IAG Cargo as the logistics partner for its exhibition ‘Titanosaur – Life as the biggest dinosaur’, which starts in November. In London, this fossil will be on display in Europe for the first time.
The ancient giant was dismantled in Trelew (Argentina) and then transported by truck from there in more than 40 crates. It was flown to London Heathrow airport in the belly of two British Airways Boeing 787-9 passenger aeroplanes.
After landing, its journey to the museum continued in a specially-constructed container. In March, the dinosaur will be painstakingly reassembled for an exhibition.
The Natural History Museum attracts the most indoor visitors in the United Kingdom; its numerous travelling exhibitions have been seen by approximately 20 million people in the last ten years. Its scientific collections contain more than 80 million items, and have been accessed by more than 30 billion digital data downloads to date.
In 2021, the more than 2,250 people employed worldwide by IAG Cargo generated a turnover of around EUR 1.7 billion. At the end of 2021 parent company IAG had no less than 531 aircraft in its global fleet.