Name: A Short Tale About Diplodocus' Long Neck
Uploaded: 2021-05-01T07:44:31.000Z
Duration: 10 min 6 s
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153 million years ago in Montana, the giant dinosaur known as Diplodocus wandered through

a seasonal wetland looking for its lunch.

Like most other sauropod dinosaurs, Diplodocus was pretty big - it weighed almost as much

as 4 elephants, and was about as long as three school buses.

And: a full 25% of that length was its neck, far longer than any mammal's neck would

If it sat back on its haunches to rear up, like some paleontologists have hypothesized

that it could have, then Diplodocus might've reached a full 11 meters up into the trees.

So, you might understand why some paleontologists were surprised after studying the teeth of

Based on the scratch marks they found on the teeth, it turned out that the primary diet

of Diplodocus wasn't the leaves of trees; it was ground cover, like ferns and horsetails.

And it's not just Diplodocus that ate this way.

Other sauropods that lived in the same area -- a region known today as the Morrison Formation

Like, the 25 metric ton, 23 meter-long Apatosaurus, which also ate mostly ground-level plants.

Or the 15 meter long Camarasaurus, which ate tougher, shrub-sized plants and short trees

- despite being around 4 meters tall at the shoulder, which is almost two and a half Kallies

Each of these dinosaurs had a neck that was much longer than the animal was tall - way

longer than it needed to be for the dinosaur's mouth to reach the ground.

But if so many sauropods were eating ground-level plants, why did they all have such long necks?

It turns out that it did give them a huge advantage when it came to food, but not in

And this benefit would allow them to become the biggest terrestrial animals of all time!

Being big comes with a fair number of advantages.

It makes you harder to attack and eat, for one.

And larger animals tend to lose heat more slowly, which means they can spend less energy

Bigger bodies can also store more energy for later, which helps them make it through tough

They can also move farther, and faster, than most small bodies can - so they can survive

in environments where food sources are farther apart.

And if bigger is better, then sauropods were the best, as they became the largest animals

Some, like Argentinosaurus from the Cretaceous of -- wait for it -- Argentina, got to be

35 meters long and could have weighed up to 70 metric tons.

But while they would end up evolving to be absolutely enormous, the sauropod dinosaurs

Sauropods are part of a larger group of dinosaurs called the sauropodomorphs, or sauropod-like

Scientists are still arguing about what the precise distinction is between the two.

But the most common definition is that once sauropodomorphs had to stand on all four legs

and stopped having grasping fingers, they were officially sauropods.

Still, all of the similarities between sauropods and sauropodomorphs means that it's a little

hard to tell exactly when sauropods themselves evolved.

The first possible sauropod tracks show up toward the end of the Triassic Period, around

But the earliest known definitely-probably-sauropod bones appear about 5 million years later in

And, based on those bones and the partial skeleton of another, slightly younger species,

paleontologists think that the first sauropods probably looked something like the Early Jurassic

dinosaur from Zimbabwe known as Vulcanodon

Vulcanodon was not as big as its later relatives, but it was a lot bigger than you: estimates

vary, but suggest it was around 9 or so meters long, and around 10 metric tons.

And it looked a lot like the sauropodomorphs that it coexisted with, having a somewhat

shorter neck and generally smaller body size than later sauropods.

But Vulcanodon had one subtle but important new feature:

Unlike other sauropodomorphs, its front legs were about as long as its back legs, and it

probably spent all of its time on all fours.

That shift to four-leggedness was an important glimpse of what was to come.

Being big requires a lot of stable support - and once they acquired the stability they

needed, they pretty quickly started to increase in size.

By the middle Jurassic, sauropods like Patagosaurus were almost twice the length of Vulcanodon.

By the end of the Jurassic, sauropods had become truly massive.

For example, Giraffatitan, was a 26-meter long monster from Tanzania, and is estimated

And as sauropods got bigger and heftier, their necks did too.

The 10-meter long neck of Giraffatitan had nothing on the 15 meter long neck of Supersaurus,

the longest-necked sauropod found so far.

Now, paleontologists think that those long necks weren't just some weird byproduct

of their large body size; instead, they actually made it possible for sauropods to become as

The best-accepted hypothesis for why long necks evolved in the first place is that having

a long neck expanded a dinosaur's feeding envelope.

Essentially, a feeding envelope is the space within which an animal can reach food without

After all, moving consumes energy – so the less you have to move in order to get to your

Maximizing your feeding efficiency is a key step for getting big, so long necks and big

bodies are pretty closely linked in sauropod dinosaurs.

There were, of course, always exceptions, but on the whole - the bigger the body, the

Long necks were such a successful adaptation that, in the Late Jurassic, sauropods were

represented by 19 different genera worldwide.

And 10 of those can be found in the Morrison Formation in Montana, where Diplodocus and

But while long necks are a good clue that a sauropod was eating a lot, they aren't

actually a good indication of what exactly it was eating.

Sure, there were sauropods that fed on tree-tops: Brachiosaurus, for example, had wear on its

teeth that matched well with a tree-munching lifestyle.

But the ones that ate at ground level like Diplodocus had equally long necks and big

And while that might seem a little strange, it makes more sense when you understand the

It didn't rain much in the Morrison Formation.

Instead, most water flowed in from nearby mountains, channeled by seasonal streams that

Without rain, most of this big basin was home to an open, dry environment and very few trees.

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A Short Tale About Diplodocus' Long Neck

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