Brachiosaurus head at the Am Museum of Natural History. Photo from Am Museum.
Holy cow! Or, maybe I should say Holy Brachiosaurus … or Holy Argentinasaurus…. or Holy Breviparopus….
These dudes got big!
In today’s dinosaur B-themed post, I’m going to share a little bit (and it’s already three days late and I haven’t much time, so not too much) on what, how, and why about these big-a@@ed creatures.
How Big Was Big?
Think almost half the length of a football field (American or European). The longest and largest dinosaur where much of the skeleton was discovered is either Argentinosaurus huinculensis or Patagotitan mayorum. Both of them were in a group labeled “Titanosaurs” and both were identified from bones discovered in — yep — Argentina. They ranged in length from 30 to 40 meters… about 45 yards and may have weighed around 80 tons.
As soon as you get measurements, of course, you start wondering, well, how much is that? Football fields are handy just because many people have seen them. For reference, a 757 aircraft weighs around 100 tons and is about 40 m, so visualize a living, stalking creature that looks like a giant airplane. Walking around on a football field, waving its intensely long neck around and wondering where all the veggies went. Forty meters is also the world record (officially Guinness WR) for flinging a Frisbee, so imagine throwing a Frisbee as long as a dinosaur!
As we start this journey of 26 posts all about dinosaurs, you may have noticed that A does not start with a kind of dinosaur. This is not going to be about 26 different dinosaurs, although I promise I will throw in a few. So A is not for Apatosaurus, Ankylosaurus, Albertosaurus, or even Archosaur. This A is about how dinosaurs were grouped and identified as dinosaurs.
So one thing to know, even before I say more about what the ant-orbit-a-whatchamacallit, is that these posts are going to wrestle with questions about dinosaurs, such as:
What made a dinosaur a dinosaur?
Where did the dinosaurs come from? And where did they go?
What did they look like?
How did they behave?
And, most of all, how do we know?
In other words, I’m going to talk about the things that dinosaurs did. Their habits. Their loves and losses.. well, maybe not that. But the dinosaur ouvre, so to speak (i.e. their “body of work.” Body get it?) Since they lived 200 million years ago, it gets a little tricky trying to guess. But you would be surprised at what those clever scientists who study bones can figure out, just from the bones.
Every April, bloggers can try the A to Z challenge. Twenty-six posts about any subject. For 2024, I covered the alphabet on dinosaur characteristics, history of their identification, and famous people who dug for their bones. Links to all the individual posts by letter are in this “master” post below.
Da king! The Rex man! From the Dinosaur Journey museum, Fruita, CO. Photo by kajmeister.
I had been threatening. Pleading. Hinting for the last few years that I might just write about dinosaurs because I love ’em, and I hope you will, too. I have trekked across half a dozen dinosaur museums, as many fossil beds, gift shops, exhibits and so on. Often dragged my wife, sometimes my kids. (Does Big Foot count? Of course not! What about Godzilla? Well, let’s wait till the letter G and find out!)
Why do it? I wrote about the Olympics during the pandemic, it led to a book. Wrote about accounting–guess what the topic of my thesis is? Wrote about the Renaissance–worked it into my thesis. Wrote a published essay on the Mongols and the Silk Road… when you produce writing, it’s the gift that keeps on giving.
I do this because creativity is like a positive kind of algae. It breeds on itself. When you don’t produce, it gets harder to start every time you try.
From the Royal Tyrell Museum, Alberta, CA. Photo by kajmeister.
This is not just a list of dinosaurs, A-Z. While I could have talked about Apatosaurus, Albertosaurus, or Ankylosaurs, you can see that my first “A” post is something about the way dinosaurs are designed. Many of these posts covered the science and facts concerning dinosaurs, not just 26 posts about individual dinosaurs. There are a lot of A-Z lists and books already out there, if you just want know all the dinosaurs that start with “K,” for example.
These posts will be about what dinosaurs are and are not. There were even a few posts about non-dinosaurs, like the swimmers and fliers who were related but not technically on the dinosaur family tree. Family trees–they’re now called clades–figure heavily into all this discussion. See letter C.
Don’t despair! You can see with posts like “D is for Diplodocus” that I did cover a few famous dinosaurs. But let’s start with one of the key features that defines dinosaurs, then talk about what they were like. Next to each post link I also include the key question that the post tries to answer.
