Apatosaurus
Name means “Deceptive lizard”
Apatosaurus was a huge long-necked plant-eater with a super thick neck and a whip-like tail. It was a very close cousin of Brontosaurus.
Apatosaurus was a heavily built diplodocid sauropod from the Late Jurassic Morrison Formation of the western United States. It had unusually broad, deep neck vertebrae, which some scientists think point to neck-to-neck combat, and its tangled naming history with Brontosaurus is one of the most famous stories in palaeontology.
Apatosaurus louisae by durbed.jpg — Durbed · CC BY-SA 3.0
Pictures
Spin it in 3D
3D model description: a 3D model of Apatosaurus shaped from a scientific life reconstruction painting, with the painting's colours and skin texture wrapped around it. It is not a scan of a real fossil.
About this model
This model is shaped from a scientific life reconstruction by Durbed: the painting's outline gives the 3D body and the painting itself is its skin. It is sized to the real animal's length (about 22.0 m), so in AR it appears life-size!
It looks best from the side, like the painting it comes from. It is not a fossil scan — museums such as the Smithsonian 3D collection share real fossil scans you can explore.
What might it sound like?
Transcript: Deep, slow, earth-shaking boom, about 4 seconds long
🤔 Nobody knows exactly how dinosaurs sounded
This is a scientific guess: no one knows exactly how Apatosaurus sounded. Very large animals usually make very low sounds, and birds and crocodiles, its closest living relatives, both make closed-mouth booming calls.
Voice boxes and soft tissue almost never fossilise, so sound reconstructions use clues: body size (bigger animals make lower sounds), the calls of living relatives (crocodiles boom with closed mouths; birds coo and hiss), and hollow structures such as hadrosaur crests that could have worked like a trumpet.
Sound: synthesised by DinoVerse from these scientific ideas (CC0). It is a creative guess, not a recording.
Food and habits
Herbivore
Plant-eater
How it ate
Swung its thick, powerful neck from side to side to crop low and mid-height plants with simple peg-like teeth, swallowing them whole to be broken down in its huge gut.
🔍 How do we know?
- peg-like tooth shape
- tooth wear
- square, broad snout suited to cropping
- plant fossils from the Morrison Formation
It ate…
- Ferns
- Horsetails
- Conifer branches
- Cycads
- Ginkgo leaves
Apatosaurus
…and was eaten by
Allosaurus- Torvosaurus
- Ceratosaurus
Arrows show energy moving up the food chain: from food to eater.
Watch it feed
Quick facts
| 📏 Length | 21–23 m (69–75 ft) |
|---|---|
| ↕️ Height | 4.5–5 m (15–16 ft) |
| ⚖️ Weight | 16,000–33,000 kg (35,270–72,750 lb) |
| ⏳ When it lived | 152–151 million years ago (Late Jurassic) |
| 📍 Fossils found | Morrison, Colorado, USA; Como Bluff, Wyoming, USA; Dinosaur National Monument, Utah, USA; Kenton, Oklahoma, USA |
| 🔎 Discovered | 1877 by Othniel Charles Marsh |
| 🧬 Group | Sauropods — Saurischia › Sauropodomorpha › Sauropoda |
Where scientists disagree, we show a range. Sizes are for adults.
How big was it?
Where and when
- 📍 Morrison, Colorado, USA (North America)
- 📍 Como Bluff, Wyoming, USA (North America)
- 📍 Dinosaur National Monument, Utah, USA (North America)
- 📍 Kenton, Oklahoma, USA (North America)
Lived 152–151 million years ago
That's about 152 million years before you were born! Humans have only existed for about 0.3 million years.
See it on the big timeline →Did you know?
- 1Apatosaurus weighed about as much as four or five elephants!
- 2Its neck was so thick and chunky that it was wider than its body in some places.
- 3For many years, museum skeletons of Apatosaurus wore the wrong head!
- 4Its tail was long and skinny at the end, like a whip.
- Its neck vertebrae have huge, low-hanging cervical ribs, making the neck triangular in cross-section; one hypothesis is that males fought by shoving or striking with their necks.
- For decades museum mounts carried a short, boxy Camarasaurus-like skull; in the 1970s John McIntosh and David Berman showed that a longer, Diplodocus-like skull belonged to Apatosaurus, and the Carnegie Museum mounted the correct head in 1979.
- A 1999 bone-microstructure study concluded that Apatosaurus grew very rapidly when young and reached near-adult size in about 10 years.
- Mass estimates vary from about 16 to over 30 tonnes depending on the species, the specimen and the method used.
Myth vs fact
❌ MythApatosaurus and Brontosaurus are just two names for the same dinosaur.
✅ FactO. C. Marsh named Apatosaurus in 1877 and Brontosaurus in 1879. In 1903 Elmer Riggs decided they were the same, and the older name Apatosaurus won. But a big 2015 study found enough differences to bring Brontosaurus back as its own genus, so today they are close cousins, not one animal.
❌ MythSauropods like Apatosaurus lived in swamps to support their weight.
✅ FactIts strong, column-like legs, footprints on dry ground and air-filled bones show it was a land animal.
❌ MythApatosaurus dragged its tail on the ground.
✅ FactTrackways almost never show tail drag marks; the tail was held up to balance the long neck.
Mini quiz
1. What does 'Apatosaurus' mean?
2. In what year was Brontosaurus brought back as its own genus?
3. What mistake did museums make with Apatosaurus for many years?
Related animals
Diplodocus
SauropodLate JurassicHerbivore
Brachiosaurus
SauropodLate JurassicHerbivoreAllosaurus
TheropodLate JurassicCarnivore
Stegosaurus
StegosaurLate JurassicHerbivore
Sources
Media on this page
- Apatosaurus louisae by durbed.jpg — Durbed · CC BY-SA 3.0
- Fern in forest by I. Levitan (1895, N. Novgorod).jpg — Isaac Levitan · Public domain
- Apatosaurus 3D model, shaped from the life reconstruction "Apatosaurus louisae by durbed.jpg" — Durbed (artwork); 3D shaping by DinoVerse · CC BY-SA 3.0
- Apatosaurus reconstructed call (synthesised) — DinoVerse (synthesised) · CC0 1.0
- Apatosaurus louisae - CM.jpg — AbstractionBlue · CC BY-SA 4.0
- AMNH Apatosaurus.jpg — ScottRobertAnselmo · CC BY-SA 3.0
- Apatosaurus ajax holotype cervical.png — Mike Taylor, modifications by I. Reid. · CC BY 3.0
- Apatosaurus ajax sacrum.jpg — Othniel Charles Marsh (1831–1899) · Public domain