Interesting Facts About The Brontosaurus

Brontosaurus: The Giant That Lived Among Giants

If there is one thing that is found to be common as far as dinosaurs are concerned, it has to be their size. The creatures are amazingly big that reading their statistics normally leaves a person wondering how they ever existed. It only gets better in that there were those that were considered giants. In other words, they were bigger than the rest. One of these giants was known as Brontosaurus or more accurately, the Apatosaurus, it is one of the biggest creatures to ever inhabit this world.

The Physical Anatomy

The dinosaur lived during the late Jurassic era, and was among the last ones before they were wiped out by extinction. The giant dinosaur had a height of about 75 feet and weighed a staggering 22 metric tons. This shows why scientists call it the giant that lived among giants. The dinosaur was so tall that its hips were 15 feet off the ground. It was characterized by a very long neck and an extremely long tail that was about 50 feet in length.
Its feeding habits

The dinosaur was a vegetarian and there is so much debate about how it used to eat. Most people said that the giant creature used to eat tree leaves but the majority of the scientists that have been involved in the study of this dinosaur refute that. They argue that the sheer size of the dinosaur made it impossible for it to keep its head vertical for the fact that its heart would not be able to pump blood all the way to the head. This would have killed the dinosaur. Instead, they say that the animal normally maintained a horizontal stance and would feed on lower ground plants. This is more feasible as the heart would have an easy time pumping blood on a horizontal plane. It is also though that the dinosaur used its long neck to pull plants from marshes, an area where the rest of its body could not manage to go.

Other than that, it is generally agreed that Brontosaurus spent the most of its day eating. The logic behind this is that it had to have lost of food to sustain its bulky weight. To give a general idea, the dinosaur was about 4 adult elephants combined into one. This meant that a group of these dinosaurs would strip the land bare of all vegetation in a matter of days which in turn means that the dinosaurs never stayed in one place for a long time. They would move in search of more vegetation the moment they emptied a particular area.

Main features

This Brontosaurus has been compared to many other but it had some features that distinguished it from the rest. To start with, its cervical vertebrae were not elongated and they were stronger than those found in other dinosaurs. In addition, the dinosaur had legs that were longer and stronger than those of other dinosaurs and this further supports the theory that it assumed a horizontal position most of the time.

This dinosaur is surrounded by so much controversy in that there are people who say that it spent much of its early years in water in submerged in order to support its bulky weight. As more research was released, it became evident that this would not have been possible as the dinosaur would have suffocated within minutes. To add to that, there are footprints that have been found that suggest that the dinosaur had the ability to walk on its hind legs but as it normally happens in the world of science, this is also under debate.

As far as the structure is concerned, it is thought that the dinosaur used its long tail to aid in locomotion. Due to its bulk size, moving was most likely a problem so it wafted its long whip like tail to propel forwards. On the same note, the tail might have been used as a weapon. However, this has been refuted far and over as the tail is not that strong and it does not have any spikes. All the same, the fact that Brontosaurus might mean that it was rarely attacked hence had no reason to have defensive features.