I was like you once, suffering under the misguided notion that sauropods, like Brachiosaurus or Apatosaurus, held their heads low to the ground and their necks horizontally. Turns out, that was just another body myth perpetuated by Hollywood and the mainstream media. And museums, and public television. Scientists now think that these giant creatures held their heads high. And rightly so. I would be proud if I weighed twenty tons. That is quite the feat.
New evidence suggests that these dinosaurs held their necks vertically like giraffes. That means that they would have been up to 49 feet tall. Which is really, really tall, in case you were wondering.
Scientists studied x-rays of vertebrae from ten different groups of vertebrates, or animals with backbones, and found that animals with the same upright leg posture as these dinosaurs, like mammals and birds, have vertical vertebrae.
This means that, in the words of Dr. Mike Taylor, who was instrumental to this research, “Unless sauropods carried their heads and necks differently from every living vertebrate, we have to assume that the base of their neck was curved strongly upwards. In some sauropods this would have meant a graceful swan-like S-curve to the neck, and a look quite different from the recreations we are used to seeing today.”
The research also showed that sauropods would have had a much greater range of movement than previously thought. By observing the structure of neck vertebrae in animals like ostriches and giraffes, researchers discovered that the ball and socket joint structure of sauropods was probably more flexible than scientists believed.
The next step in this research is to determine, through engineering studies, whether holding the neck vertically or horizontally is more efficient. Imagine having a thousand pound neck to support! Oy. I can't even bench press the bar! Of course, sauropods have a little bit of a weight advantage, I mean, I only weigh half a ton. But still.(I wrote this for Science Buzz)
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