The Brontosaurus muddle
For years Brontosaurus was thought to be the same animal as Apatosaurus. A 2015 study argued they are different after all.
Jurassic giants · Long-necked plant-eaters
Apatosaurus
Deceptive lizard · ah-PAT-oh-SORE-us
A heavy long-neck with a thick neck, a deep body and a long whip tail.
- Size
- About 22m long; 20 to 25 tonnes
- Lived
- About 152 to 151 million years ago
- Found in
- Colorado, Utah, Oklahoma and Wyoming, USA
Lumbers after you. Move your pointer and see.
To scale
How big was it?
The bars are drawn to the same scale. On these pages the animals are sized in proportion to each other as far as a screen allows: the giants are shrunk a little and the smallest are enlarged, so that you can see them all.
Good to know
Six things about the apatosaurus
The wrong head
For decades museum skeletons carried the skull of a different dinosaur by mistake.
A neck for fighting?
Its neck bones were unusually thick and strong. Some scientists think rivals fought by swinging their necks.
It grew fast
It reached full size in perhaps ten to fifteen years.
Footprints a metre wide
Trackways show that herds of long-necks walked together.
Built heavier than Diplodocus
It was shorter than Diplodocus but weighed nearly twice as much.
The real thing
Photos of the apatosaurus
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Photos are from Wikimedia Commons, used under the free licences shown. They have been resized, and cropped where they appear in link previews.
What it ate
Ferns, cycads and conifer leaves.
How we know
It was named in 1877, during a fierce rivalry between two American fossil hunters known as the Bone Wars.
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