🦕Sauropods

Long-necked giants

Saurischia › Sauropodomorpha › Sauropoda

Sauropods were the biggest animals ever to walk on land. They had super-long necks for reaching lots of plants and tiny heads. Some were longer than three school buses!

Sauropods are giant, four-legged plant-eaters within Sauropodomorpha, the saurischian branch that also includes smaller, earlier "prosauropods" such as Plateosaurus. True sauropods spread in the Early Jurassic and survived until the end-Cretaceous extinction 66 million years ago. Their vertebrae were hollowed out by air sacs connected to the lungs, lightening the skeleton, much as in birds today. They did not chew; instead they stripped and swallowed plants whole and relied on a huge gut to digest them. Well-known members include Diplodocus, Brachiosaurus and the titanosaurs Argentinosaurus and Patagotitan, which may have weighed 50–70 tonnes or more.