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.

From an early age, I had struggled to fathom how a loving God could possibly have passed a death sentence on creatures as magnificent as dinosaurs. At an age when I only had to look at a cow to wish it were a Triceratops, it filled me with a sombre sense of the sheer immensity of time, and the impermanence of living things on the face of the planet, to know that the placid fields which stretched behind my house had once been a Jurassic swamp.

How was my understanding of this to be combined with what I was simultaneously being taught in Sunday School: that God had created the heavens and earth in six days, that he had fashioned every living creature, “every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air”, only a short time before fashioning humans; and that all of them had co-existed? How did dinosaurs fit into this narrative?

At Sunday School, our illustrated children’s Bible showed Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden alongside a Brachiosaurus. That no human being had ever seen a sauropod – a source of the intensest grief to me – seemed not to worry my teacher one little bit. When I asked her how Adam could possibly have lived alongside dinosaurs, bearing in mind that they had all died out 65 million years ago, she shrugged the question aside. The older I got, the more the question niggled. God, speaking to Job from the whirlwind, had told him of drawing Leviathan with a hook, and with a cord pressing down his tongue.

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But I found this hard to square with what I knew of ichthyosaurs and mosasaurs. The reaches of time seemed too icily immense for the life and death of a single human being two thousand years ago possibly to have had the cosmic significance claimed for it by Christianity. Why should Homo sapiens be granted a status denied ammonites? Why, if God existed, had he allowed so many species to evolve, to flourish, and then utterly to disappear? Why, if he were merciful and good, had he permitted an asteroid to smash into the side of the planet, making the flesh on the bones of dinosaurs burst into flame, the Mesozoic seas boil, and darkness cover the face of the earth? Increasingly, the hope offered by the Christian story, that there was an order and a purpose to humanity’s existence, felt like something that was slipping my grasp.

I was hardly the first to tread this path, of course.

Dinosaurs had played a notable and glamorous role in the Victorian crisis of faith. To Edward Drinker Cope, a Quaker from Philadelphia whose genius as a palaeontologist served to revolutionise the understanding of prehistory, they were literally the stuff of nightmares. In 1876, fossil-prospecting in the badlands of Montana, where the bones of dinosaurs stretched for miles in an immense and uncharted graveyard, the monsters he had been excavating by day would come to visit him in his sleep, “tossing him into the air, kicking him, trampling him down”.

Every evening, before retiring for the night, he would hold prayer meetings and readings from the Bible – but still the dinosaurs kept haunting his dreams. The immensity of geological time; the cycles of evolution; the brutal finality of extinction: all, when he contemplated them, served to corrode his faith. Bones entombed in rock seemed to mock the reassurance provided by the Christian message of the Resurrection. In 1877, a year after he had lain amid the fossil beds of Montana, Cope resigned from the Society of Friends.

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Yet without Christianity, it is unlikely that dinosaurs would ever have been identified as prehistoric creatures many millions of years old, that Cope would ever gone prospecting for their fossils, and that I, as a child, would ever have known the first thing about sauropods. In truth, fathoming the deep past of the earth was an ambition that had always come naturally to Christians. “Of old,” the Psalmist had written in praise of the Creator, “You founded the earth, and the heavens – Your handiwork. They will perish and You will yet stand. They will all wear away like a garment.”

Here, in this vision of a world that had both a beginning and a history, linear and irreversible, lay an understanding of time in decisive contrast to that of most peoples in antiquity. To read Genesis was to know that it did not go round in endless cycles.

Unsurprisingly, then, scholars of the Bible had repeatedly sought to map out a chronology that might reach back before humans. “We must not suppose,” Luther had declared, “that the appearance of the world is the same today as it was before sin.” Increasingly, though, enthusiasts for what by the late 18th century had come to be termed ‘geology’ were founding their investigations, not on Genesis, but directly on their study of God’s creation: rocks, and fossils, and the very contours of the earth.

It was among the clergy that this had grown to become a particular obsession. In 1650, when James Ussher, the Archbishop of Armagh and one of the most brilliant scholars of his day, sought to establish a global chronology, his exclusive reliance on written records – and in particular on the Bible – led him to identify the date of the Creation as 4004 BC.

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In 1822, when William Buckland, another clergyman, published a paper demonstrating that life on earth, let alone the deposition of rocks, was infinitely older than Noah’s Flood, it was his dating of the fossils he had found in a Yorkshire cave that enabled him to demonstrate his point. Two years later, he wrote the first full account of a dinosaur. In 1840, he argued that great gouges across the landscape of Scotland bore witness to an ancient – and decidedly unbiblical – Ice Age. Buckland, a noted eccentric with a taste for eating his way through every kind of animal, from bluebottles to porpoises, saw not the slightest contradiction between serving as Dean of Westminster and lecturing on geology at Oxford.

Nor did most Christians. Although some, clinging to a literal interpretation of Genesis, refused to accept that the earth’s history might stretch back immeasurable distances before man, the vast majority felt only awe before a Creator capable of working on such a prodigious scale.

Palaeontology, then, bred as it was of the biblical understanding of time, served to buttress as well as shake the foundations of Christian belief. If Cope ended up losing his faith, then many palaeontologists did not. Today, Bob Bakker – perhaps the most celebrated of all living palaeontologists, whose theories have proven as influential as anyone’s on the way that dinosaurs have come to be understood – sees no contradiction between his work as a scientist and his preaching as a Pentecostal minister. When he declares the discovery of the Mesozoic to have been “the proud legacy of evangelicals who searched for the truth in the pages of Scripture and the chapters written in stone,” he is not wrong.

Does Jesus love dinosaurs? It remains a question I am unqualified to answer – but certainly, without Christianity, we would have lacked the understanding of time that enables us today to know that such wondrous and extraordinary creatures as dinosaurs ever existed.

Tom Holland’s Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind is published by Little, Brown