Dinosaur family Fernbank Museum

Stand under the atrium and look up: a plant-eater more than 123 feet long is locked in an epic battle with a predator, while a flock of pterosaurs scatters overhead. This is Giants of the Mesozoic at Fernbank Museum of Natural History in Atlanta, a staged scene of prehistoric Patagonia. The Argentinosaurus is given as weighing over 100 tons and measuring more than 123 feet, which the museum compares to nearly four school buses. The Giganotosaurus, a meat-eater, is given as 47 feet long and 8 to 10 tons, with a six-foot skull, and Fernbank says it was nearly four feet longer than Tyrannosaurus rex. Overhead, the museum counts 21 Pterodaustro, each with a wingspan of 52 inches, and an Anhanguera with a wingspan of 18 to 19 feet. Fernbank states that the skeletons are cast replicas; the fossil bones remain in Argentina, where they are protected as a national treasure. The Georgia Encyclopedia says the museum installed the display in its atrium in 2001, modelled on Patagonian fossils, and that Fernbank was the first museum in the world to install full-scale dinosaur skeleton replicas of this magnitude. Fernbank repeated a similar first-museum claim in 2025, when it announced a $27 million capital campaign. The exhibit is more than a row of skeletons. The museum invites visitors to play paleontologist on the terrain around the dinosaurs, looking for buried fossils and trace fossils such as dinosaur tracks, an Araucaria tree, a crocodile and a turtle shell. A visitor travel writer looked down on the display from the museum's second floor and found it almost impossible to photograph the whole skeleton in one frame. Fernbank has announced phased renovations running through 2027, so surrounding galleries may change during a visit.