Apatosaurus

Apatosaurus is one of the most famous of the giant Jurassic plant-eaters. It was a sauropod, a member of a race of huge, long-necked dinosaurs. It was longer than two school buses and weighed as much as 4 adult male African elephants. For years, an Apatosaurus body stood with the head of Camarasaurus on the end of its neck. This was named Brontosaurus and was one of the most popular dinosaurs for many years. In 2015, the Brontosaurus genus was revived and several species of Apatosaurus were resigned to the Brontosaurus genus.

Apatosaurus is a fairly typical member of the diplodocid family – long neck, pillar-like legs, long tapering tail, and enormous size. It had, like the other family members, peg-like teeth in a head that seemed very small for such a large creature. Compared to Diplodocus, Apatosaurus has a shorter, thicker neck, and a larger, heavier body. There is much speculation about how much these creatures needed to eat and how such a small head could ingest enough food to fuel such a large body. Some scientists have stated that these huge, small-headed creatures would have needed to eat every waking moment in order to provide enough food to keep such a large body alive. Apatosaurus seemed to have every adaptation needed for continuous eating. Despite looking defenseless other than its huge size, the tail was like a giant bullwhip that could probably make a loud cracking sound of about 200 decibels, enough to scare or even deafen theropods such as Allosaurus.

In order to facilitate the processing of food, which it could not chew with its teeth. Apatosaurus probably swallowed stones that it kept in a gizzard similar to that found in a chicken. The tough plant fibers would spend time in the gizzard stewing and ground up by the stones.

The Apatosaurus reaches its full size in 10 years.