From miles away - and eons ago

It was more massive than 21 Ford Expeditions. It had leg bones as thick as tree trunks. Upper arms longer than the height of a full-grown man.

Behold the newest inhabitant of Philadelphia:

The second-heaviest dinosaur ever found.

The dino's bones arrived this week at the Packer Avenue Marine Terminal after a three-week voyage from Argentina, where they had been unearthed by Drexel University paleontologists.

Yesterday the prehistoric shipment was opened for a public viewing.

At 11:40 a.m., under a gray sky alongside the Delaware River, the orange doors of a 40-foot shipping container swung open. A crowd of onlookers peered inside.

By any measure, it was a huge heap of bones - 16 tons' worth, if you include the plaster they were packed in. A label on the container stated the obvious: "Super Heavy."

When the bones were laden with flesh 65 million years ago, the plant-eating creature was even heavier, of course. A member of the long-necked sauropods, it weighed an estimated 60 tons, said Drexel's Ken Lacovara, the team leader.

"We're looking at about a dozen elephants here," he said, before taking a celebratory sip from a flute of champagne.

Lacovara and his colleagues unearthed the first few bones from the giant beast in 2005. It took years to dig them all up, plus they had to negotiate with Argentinian officials about taking them north.

The fossils will stay in Pennsylvania for four years before returning to the South American country for display in a museum. Next month, experts will begin carefully removing the plaster, mud, and rock that surround the bones so they can be analyzed.

Some of the work will take place in a lab at the Academy of Natural Sciences, where museum-goers can watch. Other bones will be sent to Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

The bones will be scanned with a laser so that three-dimensional replicas can be made, though there are no firm plans yet to put a complete one on display. The scans also will enable scientists to study the biomechanics of how the dinosaur walked.

The heaviest dino known, by the way, is the 100-ton Argentinosaurus, but that weight estimate is pretty rough. The one known skeleton of that species, also found in Argentina, consists of only a few vertebrae.

The Drexel find, on the other hand, includes almost every type of bone, from limbs to vertebrae - even, they think, a few bits of skull.

The scientists don't know yet how many bones they have; they encased the various bits and pieces in 232 plaster jackets before removing them from the ground. Clearly, it's a lot of calcium.

The team also can't say yet what specific kind of sauropod it is. Sauropods are a group of dinosaurs that include the brontosaurus, the tiny-headed beast known to cartoon fans as Fred Flintstone's crane.

The shipment arrived Monday aboard the Cap San Lorenzo. The shipping company, Hamburg Süd, makes a run from South America to Philadelphia once a week, bearing cargo that ranges from frozen beef to shoes.

But dinosaur bones? That's a first, said Jeffrey H. Parker, a company vice president who was on hand for the unveiling.

Also on hand was Gerardo Povazsan, an Argentine rancher who doubles as Lacovara's fixer when he is digging in the rocky remoteness of southern Patagonia.

As the bones were unearthed, they were temporarily stored in Povazsan's mother's chicken yard.

The chickens often hopped on top of the plaster-jacketed dino bones, which to Lacovara was a fitting juxtaposition.

Paleontologists consider chickens and other modern birds to be dinosaurs.

But to see one that weighed 60 tons, you would have to go back 65 million years. Or, in a few weeks, you can start to see one emerge in Philadelphia.