Cienciaes.com: Diplodocus, the longest terrestrial animal.

2009-10-31 03:41:03

Of all the terrestrial animals, living or extinct, that we know from their complete skeleton, Diplodocus is the longest. Diplodocus, a sauropod dinosaur that lived in western North America in the late Jurassic, about 150 million years ago, grew to nearly 100 feet in length from the tip of its snout to the tip of its tail; of that length, seven meters correspond to the neck and fourteen to the tail. However, it was not one of the largest dinosaurs: its weight did not exceed sixteen tons, much less than the hundred tons that other sauropods could reach.

The head of Diplodocus, with a tiny brain, was small and long. The forward-pointing, peg-shaped teeth were only present at the front of the jaws, and functioned like a comb or rake, stripping the branches of the trees on which it fed with lateral movements. This type of feeding wears the teeth a lot; as they wore down, the teeth were replaced with new ones. Diplodocus His stomach was full of stones, called gastroliths, which were used to crush the leaves that he swallowed whole, without chewing.

The neck, back and part of the tail of Diplodocus they were decorated by a row of sharp vertical horny spines about twenty centimeters long, similar to those of iguanas. The legs, thick as columns, were similar to those of elephants, although the first toe of the front feet was equipped with a long nail. The last meters of the tail, made up of very thin vertebrae, functioned like a whip; when shaken, the tip could move at supersonic speeds and cause a clicking noise that might help scare off predators or communicate with other individuals of its species.

The growth of Diplodocus it was very fast. The cubs, which only measured one meter in length at birth, gained about two kilos a day in their first years of life, and by the age of ten they had already reached sexual maturity. Later, the growth was slower, but it is possible that the oldest specimens reached even more than the thirty meters of the fossils that are preserved. In fact, the partial remains discovered in 1991 and originally baptized with the name of Seismosaurusfor which a total length of forty meters is calculated, have subsequently been assigned to Diplodocus.