Abstract: The top quark is the heaviest known elementary particle: with a mass as large as an entire gold atom and the only fermion with a natural Yukawa coupling. Millions of top quarks have been produced at the LHC allowing precise measurements of its properties that have been compared with Standard Model predictions. The high center-of-mass energy of the LHC can also be exploited for dedicated searches for new heavy particles decaying preferentially to top quarks. I will review the latest ATLAS results searching for evidence of new physics in the production and decay of top quarks at the LHC with the ATLAS detector.