Few creatures have pushed anatomy to its limits like sauropods. These supersized dinosaurs moved on pillar-like limbs that supported massive girth, wielded whip-like tails to ward off predators and used long necks to vacuum up foliage.
While this entire group of dinosaurs is referred to as “long necks,” Mamenchisaurus, which roved around what is now China during the late Jurassic period, would have given other sauropods neck envy. In a new study, researchers estimate that Mamenchisaurus’s neck stretched to a length of nearly 50 feet. Longer than the average school bus, its neck may be the longest neck on an animal ever observed.
In 1987, paleontologists discovered the partial skeleton of a sauropod poking out of the rusty red sandstone of the Shishugou Formation in northwest China. The remains were fragmentary, consisting mostly of a lower jaw, bits of skull and a couple of vertebrae, but they hinted at an enormous animal that thundered across marshy plains 162 million years ago.
Researchers named the dinosaur Mamenchisaurus sinocanadorum and connected it to several other long-necked sauropods from East Asia.
But Mamenchisaurus’s true size remained an enigma. No other fossilized remains of the sauropod have been excavated, leaving scientists with only those couple of vertebrae to examine.
Andrew Moore, a paleontologist at Stony Brook University who studies sauropod anatomy, said that this was the case for many of the largest dinosaurs. “What’s particularly tantalizing and frustrating is that oftentimes, the longest necks belong to the things that are the least known in the fossil record for the simple reason that it’s really hard to bury something that large,” said Moore, who led the new study.
So he turned to the fossils of several close relatives of Mamenchisaurus, especially Xinjiangtitan, a slightly older sauropod discovered in northwest China in 2013. Remarkably, researchers unearthed Xinjiangtitan’s entire vertebral column. At nearly 44 feet long, it represents the longest complete neck in the fossil record. — JACK TAMISIEA NYT
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