The historians say that the museum’s version of Maasai history and how the artifacts were gathered is a travesty of the truth. In particular, the Pitt Rivers’ website implies that the collection’s main donor, Claud Hollis — a colonial administrator, later knighted, who was also a widely respected early ethnographer of the Maasai — was a thief who must have been party to murder in order to acquire some of the more “culturally sensitive” artifacts.

“It’s the perception of the Maasai,” says Laura van Broekhoven, the museum’s director, who has been rattled by the historians’ assault on the Pitt Rivers’s respect — or disrespect — for historical accuracy. “It’s from their point of view,” she insists. Some historians have also expressed mocking skepticism over the validity of a diviner’s calabash for choosing how to select the lucky families to receive gifts of cattle worth tens of thousands of dollars.

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The museum’s involvement began in 2017 when Samwel Nangiria, a Maasai campaigner from Tanzania, was a guest of an organization based in Oxford called Insight Share, which trains activists to make videos in support of vulnerable indigenous communities around the world. During a visit to the Pitt Rivers Museum, Nangiria says he was shocked by the apparent mislabeling of artifacts and subsequently complained that some of them could have been acquired only through looting and murder. These claims were accepted at face value by the museum and were widely echoed in the media, including by the BBC and the Oxford Mail.

A series of visits ensued, with a seven-strong Maasai delegation being put up in Oxford’s grandest hotel. In return the museum has made several visits to Kenya, where celebrations were held to mark the gift of cattle, subsidized by a British family charity.

For van Broekhoven it has been an emotional journey. In a lecture in March she described how it was “extremely traumatic” for the Maasai campaigners visiting the museum to view the items for the first time. Some of them, she said, were “fainting and feeling unwell” (before being resuscitated by a special brew of peace-making medicinal tea). She likened the trauma to victims of the Holocaust once again seeing their possessions. “The whole part of their lineage had died out.” A fellow Maasai campaigner of Nangiria says that, as a result of the alleged theft around 120 years ago, “the cattle are still dying, dying”, as if cursed by the original theft.

Among the historians disturbed by the museum’s acceptance of the Maasai campaigners’ untested narrative are David Anderson, professor of African history at Warwick University and author of Histories of the Hanged, a searing account of Britain’s suppression of the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya in the Fifties; and Dr Lotte Hughes, author of Moving the Maasai: A Colonial Misadventure, an indictment of British treatment of the Maasai in the early 20th century. Richard Waller, a widely respected historian of the Maasai whose research spans half a century, praises the museum for seeking “to keep the Maasai identity and culture alive”, but says it has been “ill-advised and ill-prepared”. None of these experts can be accused of being apologists for colonialism. Anderson and Hughes have expressed dismay at what they see as the museum’s sloppy scholarship and naïveté in its decolonizing zeal.

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In a letter to the museum director, Hughes said that “some aspects of the Maasai project disturb and puzzle me from a historical point of view. Have you any supporting evidence, besides that produced by an en-kidong [the sacred calabash], that the artifacts were taken from these particular families? Have you any evidence that they were looted and Maasai were murdered in the process, as your Maasai contacts claim? Why would cattle still be dying and people suffering more than a century after the artifacts were taken? Why did the PRM take all these claims at face value, when any scholar with knowledge of Maasai history and culture could have advised you otherwise?”

Anderson is equally forthright. “Hollis was no murderer…This should be made clear by the PRM. All the indications are that he acquired his objects from members of those societies with whom he had close dealings… I am actually less concerned that the PRM have been duped into giving cattle to persons whom a laibon favored — if they are stupid enough to do this, so be it — but I am concerned that they show so little understanding of what provenance research should be done in these circumstances.”

The historians reject the museum’s acceptance of the Maasai narrative that presumes the artifacts were acquired through colonial violence. In fact, the Maasai never opposed the British militarily, though some small-scale disturbances occurred after the period when the artifacts were collected and donated. The British also habitually hired Maasai warriors as levies to help suppress other tribes that did resist British rule in the first decade of the 20th century — a fact that modern Maasai myth-makers, keen to present a history of heroic anti-colonial resistance, tend to deny.

Moreover, in 1895, when the British formally declared a “protectorate” over what became Uganda and Kenya (which was designated as a colony in 1920), it would have been easy for British interlopers to buy or barter the sort of items collected by Hollis. Indeed, one of the five museum items considered especially valued was donated by William Taylor, an early missionary and lexicographer whose scholarship is still revered by the School of African and Oriental Language in London: hardly the profile of a looter.

Van Broekhoven rejects the historians’ objections, implying that they miss the point of the museum’s partnership with today’s Maasai communities. “It’s not transactional.” It has been agreed that the items, however relabeled, will stay at the museum rather than be returned to Kenya and Tanzania. “It’s all about peace and healing and reconciliation, not about bashing colonialism,” she explains, while adding that the Maasai “lament the effect of colonialism and capitalism, the loss of land, loss of property, lack of sovereignty”. As for the selection of the five families: “We tried to find ways for a difficult process; we tried to probe and understand; we asked the Maasai; it was responsibly done.”

Hughes particularly objects to the way the museum has allowed myth and legend to supersede hard evidence-based history. “Stories about the past are transmitted orally among the Maasai and passed down from one generation to the next, but they may not be true as history. As a result of indigenous rights activism, myth and memory have come to ‘stand for’ history, and are being used to galvanize the gullible and inspire support, replacing information about what actually happened with a fantasy version of past events that is more palatable, paints the community concerned in a more favorable light and is calculated to fit the ‘decolonization’ agenda.”

In the Times Literary Supplement, a former Oxford lecturer on history, Felipe Fernández-Armesto, was still more skeptical: “To value the self-interested stone-rattling of a shaman over the objective expertise of a scholar is a form of silliness worthy of a post-truth world.” A Kenyan academic who declined to be named told me: “They [the Maasai campaigners] will certainly be coming back for more.” The museum, says Hughes, has been well-meaning — but has been “totally hoodwinked.”

On 15 May, the Pitt Rivers was awarded an annual prize by the Museums + Heritage, an organization that supports museums, galleries and heritage events, for its “brave, sensitive and internationally significant partnership” with the Maasai Living Cultures Project. Perhaps not for historical accuracy.

And in particular to imagining it a land of giants. Magellan himself had seen a naked colossus singing and dancing on its shore — “so tall that the tallest of us only came up to his waist”. Bruce Chatwin, author of the most famous account in English of Patagonia, had once, as a child, admired a piece of skin from the region kept by his grandmother in a glass-fronted cabinet. His mother had told him that it belonged to a Brontosaurus. Inspired by this memory to travel there, he visited a lake where a Plesiosaurus was reported to lurk. A Texan adventurer, camping beside its waters in 1922, had observed the creature’s head protruding from its depths. “At first sight it was like some unknown species of swan, but swirls in the water made me think its body must resemble a crocodile’s.”

None of these reports, alas, was true. Francis Drake, observing the natives of Patagonia, dismissed Magellan’s reports of their enormous size as a typically Spanish exaggeration: “for they are nothing so monstrous and giant-like as they were represented, there being some English men as tall as the highest we could see, but peradventure the Spaniards did not think that ever any English man would come hither to reprove them, and therefore presume the more boldly to lie”. The piece of hide owned by Bruce Chatwin’s grandmother turned out to have belonged, not to a Brontosaurus, but to a sloth. Of the Plesiosaurus, not a trace was ever found. Chatwin, standing beside the lake where the Texan had reported seeing it, marvelled that anyone should for a moment have believed in its existence. “And with the plesiosaurus died the hope of finding, in Patagonia, live dinosaurs like those described by Conan Doyle, stranded on their plateau in The Lost World.”

And yet Patagonia, for all that, had indeed been home to giants. “Patagotitan” is doubly descriptive. Titanosaurs were named in 1877 after the Titans, the gods who in Greek mythology had been displaced by the Olympians, and came to serve the ancients as bywords for monstrous size. Like the Brontosaurus which was supposed to have supplied Bruce Chatwin’s grandmother with a portion of hide, they were sauropods: vast herbivorous dinosaurs distinguished by their long tails and necks, and which Victorian showman had delighted in promoting as “the most colossal animals ever on earth”. Unlike Brontosaurus, however, which went extinct 146 million years ago, the titanosaurs were still flourishing some 80 million years later, when the age of the dinosaurs was brought by an asteroid to its fiery end. Brontosaurus — “Thunder Lizard” — was so named because its footsteps had made the earth shake; but the largest titanosaurs were on a scale so vast that they would have put even Brontosaurus in the shade. In 2014, when the discovery of Patagotitan’s fossils was announced to the world, the palaeontologist leading the excavation did not hesitate to emphasise the full seismic quality of the find. “Given the size of these bones, which surpass any of the previously known giant animals, the new dinosaur is the largest animal known that walked on Earth.”

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The claim of Patagotitan to this particular record is, it must be acknowledged, not uncontested. Late Cretaceous Argentina seems to have teemed with species of titanosaurs, and various of them have been promoted as contenders for the title. Nevertheless, all those who doubt the right of the Natural History Museum to promote its new show on Patagotitan as Titanosaur: Life as the Biggest Dinosaur should head to South Kensington at once and prepare themselves for one of the most jaw-dropping spectacles they are ever likely to see. To stand next to the first fossil identified as belonging to Patagotitan — a femur found protruding from dusty ground 13 years ago by a farm hand — is properly to feel small. Even more humbling is to gaze on the arm and shoulder bones of one of the six Patagotitans to have been excavated, and then to learn that it was not even fully grown.

The climax of the show, however — a sight so awe-inspiring that it seemed the fulfilment of all the dreams I ever had as a six-year-old obsessed by dinosaurs — is a full-scale cast of an adult Patagotitan. So long are its neck and tail that they barely fit inside the cavernous chamber in which the show is being staged. The ribcage seems more like the creation of some lunatic Victorian engineer than a framework of bones. Even Paul Barrett, the palaeontologist who brought the show to London, and who has studied Mesozoic ecosystems all his professional life, admits to a sense of stupefaction at the sight. “Patagotitan,” he says, “stood at the outer limit of what terrestrial animals are capable of achieving in terms of size.”

Large organisms are not necessarily more wondrous than small: but immensity — as the stories told by the Greeks of the Titans suggest — has always inspired in humans a shiver of mingled dread and delight. Herman Melville, when he wrote his novel about an animal even heavier than a titanosaur, confessed himself overwhelmed by the potency of his great white whale as a symbol. “For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences.” This is why, in the entrance hall of the Natural History Museum, the skeleton of Hope, a blue whale, has been suspended from the ceiling since 2017: a stimulus to wonder, a prompt to reflection. If Patagotitan offers the stupefied visitor an emblem of extinction, then Hope offers an emblem of extinction threatening.

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Of all the natural history museums in the world, London’s is, perhaps, the one best calculated to give rise to such musings. Its founder, Richard Owen — the naturalist who first coined the word “dinosaur” — had consciously intended it to possess the ambience of a cathedral. Its soaring pillars and gargoyles were purposefully designed to inspire a sense of awe. Perhaps this is why Patagotitan — a long way though South Kensington may be from the deserts of Patagonia — looks so at home there. Ten metres longer than Hope, and four times as heavy as Dippy, the Diplodocus that for over a century loomed in the entrance hall of the museum, it is truly a thing of wonder. To read on the page that it measured 35 metres from snout to tail-tip and weighed 60 tonnes is one thing; to stand before a cast of its skeleton, and gawp at its length, marvel at its scale, is to experience these vital statistics translated into the dimension of the sublime.

But it is not merely Patagotitan itself that is capable of inspiring amazement. So too does the feat of resurrection, of redemption from utter oblivion, that the cast represents. Sic parvis magna. Exhibited in the show is a titanosaur egg: the very first dinosaur egg to be exhibited in a museum. Found in India in the 1820s, before the word “dinosaur” had even been coined, it was originally catalogued by curators as agate, and only identified as a dinosaur egg five years ago. Just as a Patagotitan hatchling grew to be 16,000 times the size it was when first born, so in 200 years has our knowledge of the deep past grown at a rate almost as prodigious. If it is impossible to stand before the skeleton of Patagotitan and not feel humbled by a sense of how infinite nature’s workings seem to be, how immense the reaches of geological time, how remorseless the threat of extinction, then so also is it impossible not to marvel at the feats of palaeontological science. Here be giants indeed.