Size matters: How Sauropods got so big

Patagotitan mayorum, the newly-scientific named colossal titanosaur, is seen at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. — Reuters

SAUROPODS, those familiar plant-eating dinosaurs with long necks, long tails and four pillar-like legs, were the biggest land animals in Earth’s history, reaching 30-36m long and weighing as much as a tractor-trailer.

A new study has calculated for the first time the number of different sauropod lineages that achieved whopping proportions – 36 of them in a span of about 100 million years bridging the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. There was no one-size-fits-all evolutionary strategy to become immense, with these lineages distinct from one another despite sharing a general body plan.