Front legs first
Unlike most long-necks, its front legs were longer than its back ones, so its back sloped like a giraffe's.
Jurassic giants · Long-necked plant-eaters
Brachiosaurus
Arm lizard · BRAK-ee-oh-SORE-us
A towering dinosaur with front legs longer than its back legs, a very long neck held high and a domed head.
- Size
- About 22m long, 12m tall; 30 to 50 tonnes
- Lived
- About 154 to 150 million years ago
- Found in
- Colorado and Utah, USA
Strides after you, head high. 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 brachiosaurus
As tall as a four-storey building
It could browse from the tops of trees that nothing else could reach.
A bump on its head
A tall arch of bone on its skull held its nostrils.
A huge appetite
It may have needed more than 200 kilograms of leaves every day.
A powerful heart
Pumping blood all the way up that neck needed a very large and strong heart.
Rarer than you think
Only a few partial skeletons have been found. The famous mounted one in Berlin is now given a different name.
The real thing
Photos of the brachiosaurus
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
Leaves from the tops of tall conifers, nipped off with chisel-shaped teeth.
How we know
It was named in 1903 from a partial skeleton found in Colorado.
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