Longer than three basketball courts, this gentle giant could crack its whip-like tail like a thunderclap!
With a snake-like neck up to twenty-seven feet long, a body up to sixteen feet long, and a tail up to forty-six feet long, Diplodocus took up a lot of space in the Jurassic forests. The average length of a Diplodocus skeleton is around eighty-six feet long, with a few specimens measuring nearly 90 feet from nose to tail. Imagine a group of dinosaurs longer than basketball courts!
With its long neck and tail, and a head that was tiny in proportion to the rest of its body, this dinosaur looked extraordinary. Diplodocus is one of the world's best known dinosaurs. Copies of its skeleton are on display in museums in many countries around the globe.
Diplodocus is one of many dinosaurs in the sauropod family. If attacked by a meat-eater, a sauropod's only defense was its impressive bulk and long, whip-like tail.
Although Diplodocus is one of the longest dinosaurs on record so far, much of its length was in its tail. At forty-five feet, its tail was as long as three cars!
This scaly skin impression came from a sauropod dinosaur like Diplodocus. The skin was not bony and would have given little protection against attack. Although packed tightly together, the scales had flexible edges where they touched, acting like "hinges" to allow easy movement. You can see from this impression that the scales varied in size, the smaller ones occurring where the skin had to bend a lot.
A skull can tell us a lot about its original owner, like what kind of eyes and ears the creature had for tracking its surroundings, or what kind of teeth and jaws it had for taking in food. These skulls are from very different kinds of animals. Allosaurus was a vicious carnosaur and much smaller than Diplodocus, a peaceful plant-eater.
Diplodocus may have raked in its dinner. Because it did little chewing, the dinosaur probably swallowed stones called gastroliths which ground up the plant matter, enabling the sauropod to digest the food in its stomach.
The prize for the longest neck belongs not to Diplodocus, but to Mamenchisaurus. This Chinese dinosaur had a neck measuring a staggering thirty-three feet! Unlike Diplodocus, Mamenchisaurus's neck was not balanced by a long tail.
Many scientists have thought that sauropods could only stand on all fours. But some experts who have studied the size and strength of the legs as well as the tail structure think that sauropods may have reared up on their hind legs to feed.
Diplodocus's thin whip of a tail, with its seventy-three vertebrae in all, was often carried off the ground. If their size and bulk did not frighten away attackers, sauropods used their long whiplash tails to defend themselves against predators. Imagine how big a space Diplodocus could have cleared with its forty-six feet of tail!
All dinosaurs had chevron bones in their tails, just as modern reptiles do. The chevrons were elongated close to the hips to support the muscles. They became more flattened along the length of the tail, and toward the tip the chevron bones disappeared altogether as the tail became thin and whip-like. These types of chevron bones may have acted as skids to protect the underside of the tail.
Source: Microsoft Dinosaurs (1993) CD-ROM. Text liberated from original screen art; images & audio restored from disc. Original media is Microsoft/supplier copyright — non-commercial educational preservation. Credits & Acknowledgements