A whip of a tail
Its tail had about eighty bones and tapered to a thin lash. It may have cracked it like a whip.
Jurassic giants · Long-necked plant-eaters
Diplodocus
Double beam · dip-LOD-oh-kus
An immensely long, slender dinosaur with a small head, a long neck and a tail like a whip.
- Size
- About 26m long; 12 to 15 tonnes
- Lived
- About 154 to 152 million years ago
- Found in
- Colorado, Utah, Montana and Wyoming, USA
Plods after you, tail swaying. 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 diplodocus
Dippy
A cast of a Diplodocus skeleton nicknamed Dippy stood in the Natural History Museum in London for over a century.
Teeth like a comb
It had peg-like teeth only at the front of its mouth, for raking leaves off branches. It did not chew.
Longer than a tennis court
It is one of the longest dinosaurs known from a complete skeleton.
Light for its length
Its backbones were full of air spaces, which kept the weight down.
Double beam
The name comes from the two-pronged bones under its tail.
The real thing
Photos of the diplodocus
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 and leaves, stripped from low plants and from trees. It swallowed them whole.
How we know
Several nearly complete skeletons were dug up in the American West from the 1870s onwards.
Keep going