With fossil brush in hand, we unearth the massive behemoths that ruled
over land, air and sea millions of years ago
Stegosaurus
Stegosaurus was
Slightly larger than a shipping container, but
its brain was only the size of a walnut.
Brachiosaurus
The brachiosaurus used its staggering 16m (52.5 feet)
Height to reach
Tall vegetation.
Pterosaur
The hollow bones of a pterosaur ensured it
remained light
Enough to achieve flight,
Even when reaching the size of a small plane.
It’s somewhat frightening to
Imagine what it must have been like to wander
around the plains
Of Africa and Argentina 100
million years ago. Whereas today you’d be
hard-pressed to encounter a beast any bigger than yourself, back then you’d be
running for your life as bus-sized creatures roamed free, some remaining
largely peaceful and distant, others full of aggression.
The biggest land-based animal alive today is
the African bush elephant, with the largest weighing a measly 13.5 tons and
measuring io.6m (34.8ft) long and 4.2m (13.8ft) high. Argentinosaurus, the
current of facial
Record-holder for largest dinosaur of them all,
would have been at least four times the size. It was a sauropod, dinosaurs of
the Jurassic and Cretaceous period that were mostly
Herbivores and known for being very large.
Indeed, many other types of sauropod would have stood tau above the African
bush
Elephant, as would carnivores, raptors and
pterosaurs (‘flying dinosaurs’).
0f course, the dinosaurs inhabited the Earth
for much longer than any modem
Animal, from 251 to 65 million years ago, allowing plenty of time for certain species to
develop into the giant hulks of flesh we now so revere. The biggest dinosaurs
discovered to date have largely been determined to live in the Late Cretaceous
period, 99.6-65.5 million years ago, before they
faced extinction.
For a long time, though, paleontologists have
wondered why dinosaurs grew to be so large. While impressive, size can also be
a hindrance. Not only does a large animal need
A much higher rate of metabolism, but it must
also develop much stronger bones and
Skeletal structures to be able to hold itself
upright. Many of these gigantic animals were also cumbersome and slow, leaving
themselves open to attack from large
Predators. Why did dinosaurs continue to grow
for millions of years, then?
One train of thought is that there was a huge
surplus of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere during the age of the dinosaurs.
This meant that vegetation flourished, and herbivores such as the sauropods
simply had an over-abundance of nourishment available to eat. While somewhat of
a burden in terms of manoeuvrability, their size would certainly have helped to
some extent when fending off smaller carnivores. This leads to another proposal
from palaeontologists, namely that some dinosaurs grew in size over millions of
years as a form of self-defense.
However, others think that these giant
dinosaurs were cold-blooded, which was directly responsible for their size. indeed,
warm-blooded animals simply wouldn’t be able to sustain such mammoth sizes,
Somewhat backed up by the lack of
mammals larger than a few tons today.
Huge cold-blooded sauropods, weighing in at up
to 100 tons, would have been almost self-sustainable, as they could store heat
throughout the day for the colder nights, maintaining a fairly unchanged body
temperature and prolonging their survival.
Turn over for our look at the truly
humongous beasts that would wreak endless havoc
if they roamed our planet today.
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