160-Million-Year-Old Fossil Suggests Sauropod May Have the Longest Known Neck Ever

Examination of bones discovered in 1987 shows that the sauropod from the Jurassic period had the longest neck of any animal.

Longest Neck?

One of the enormous herbivorous sauropod dinosaurs, the dinosaur measured 50 meters from snout to tail and weighed more than 70 tons. Even though there are just a few bones left of the beast, scientists were able to calculate the length of its neck by comparing the fragments to complete fossils from dinosaurs closely related to it.

Andrew Moore, a paleontologist at Stony Brook University in New York, noted that although Mamenchisaurus sinocanadorum may have had the longest neck of any sauropod found to date, it is likely that there were more enormous, longer sauropods moving around the Late Jurassic of what is now China.

"Our default assumption should always be that there were larger animals out there unless we're willing to think that we just so happened to locate the largest single individual sauropod that ever existed. We can only hope that some of these titans have preserved themselves as fossils and are just waiting for paleontologists to find them.

Long Necks

A long neck was one of the key physical characteristics that allowed sauropods to grow to such enormous sizes. The animals could consume large quantities of food without using much energy because they could graze extensive regions of vegetation while standing still. The animals' increased surface area from having a long neck may have also helped them stay cool; elephants accomplish this with their big ears.

The sauropod lifestyle developed early in the history of dinosaurs and persisted until the end of their reign during the catastrophic extinction event brought on by an asteroid collision 66 million years ago. The ancestors of modern birds are the only dinosaurs that have survived.

Discovering Giants

From the discovery of the first sauropod fossils, experts have been baffled by how the animals developed such long necks and massive bodies without falling under their weight. On the other hand, X-ray scans of the Mamenchisaurus fossils reveal that the vertebrae were light and hollow, with airspaces making up about two-thirds to three-quarters of their volume. Comparable skeletal characteristics are present in birds that reduce weight to enable flight. Such fragile skeletons would be common in sauropods, but the animal's rod-like neck ribs, and bony extensions of the vertebrae, strengthened the neck and increased stability.

According to Dr. Moore, one of the most amazing things about gigantic sauropods is how easily their bones can be produced.

"Sauropods had lungs that could invade bone and replace dense marrow and bone tissue with airways, just like their living counterparts, birds. The massive necks of the largest sauropods needed to be lighter, so a lightweight structure would have been essential.