Sauropod Dinosaur Facts

Video Transcript

"Okay, now for some of those Sauropods that were existent in the late or upper Jurassic Period. Say a hundred and thirty-five to a hundred and fifty million years ago. The best known is the Brontosaurus thing right here which means thunder lizard. However, paleontologists have now changed his name to the Apotosaurus, meaning basically the headless lizard. That's because when this model was first put together, the paleontologists involved put the wrong head on top of the rest of the body. And that was discovered, so the name Brontosaurus was officially wiped out. I prefer that to Apotosaurus. Now this fellow right here, weighed about twenty-nine tons and was about sixty-five feet in length. Long head so it could reach up and eat leaves on trees. Had a tail that it could use to defend itself by whipping it, and what's most intriguing about it is that these were entities that had very weak teeth. So they were eating a tremendous amount of food. How did they digest it? They swallowed stones, technically called Gastroliths. So their tummies were all full of stones that helped grind up all of that vegetation they were eating. Yes. Now he had a relative the Diplodokus, interestingly he had a second spine in his back, that's why they call him the double beamed lizard. He also from the upper Jurassic period, but he was actually much longer, about eighty-seven feet total from the tip of his nose to the tip of his tail.But weighed much less, only about ten tons. So he was speedier than the Brontosaurus here. Again, he could whip his tail and had those Gastroliths. And just recently, we've discovered another relative called the Nigersaurus from Niger in West Africa, which is really a hotbed of paleontological discoveries. This critter was smaller than his relatives here, he might have been only about thirty feet long and weighed one to five tons. And the most intriguing fact about him is that he had a mouth full of five hundred tiny, sharp teeth. Each major tooth was backed up by eight replacement teeth. They calling him the vacuum cleaner of the Dinos. Now he had also a very weak skull and neck, so it's not believed he could reach up very well to eat leaves. Instead he was eating grasses on the ground. Indeed they're calling him the cow of the Mesozoic Era. He cam e a little further down the line, the early Cretaceous Period, about a hundred and ten million years ago. But he was definitely related to these two and probably had those stomach stones or Gastroliths also."