Sauropods are a suborder of herbivorous dinosaurs that emerged 200 million years ago. They are known for being the largest land animals in history, with some species growing up to 60 meters long and weighing 131 tons. Sauropods had peg-like teeth for stripping leaves and used gastroliths to digest them. They also had long tails that may have produced sonic booms.
Sauropods are a suborder of Saurischia (“hipped lizard”), one of two categories of dinosaurs, the other being Ornithischia (“hipped bird”). Sauropoda is one of the two major herbivorous dinosaur lineages along with Ornithischia, which includes duck-billed dinosaurs, triceratops, stegosaurus, and many more. Sauropods are famous for being the largest land animals in the history of life on Earth.
Sauropods first emerged in the Late Triassic, 200 million years ago. The first sauropods were small by sauropod standards: 5 m (16 ft) long and a few meters high, weighing around a ton. The first sauropods would have been about the size of an elephant. They would have been able to avoid predation due to their size. Sauropods also possess long, tapering tails, which many paleontologists believe may have been snapped like a whip, producing sonic booms of up to 200 decibels. Computer simulations showed that this would have been easily within the animal’s capabilities. There is also circumstantial evidence, fossil sauropods with fused or broken tail vertebrates.
At the end of the Jurassic, 150 million years ago, sauropods spread to all continents, where their fossils are still found today. Since the beginning of their evolution, sauropods have grown to enormous sizes. Some of the largest known are Brachiosaurus, thought for many decades to be the largest dinosaur; Supersaurus, the longest verified dinosaur at 40 m (130 ft) long; Diplodocus, one of the most famous sauropods; and Sauroposeidon, with the longest neck of any known creature, at 18 m (60 ft). There is some rough evidence – literally just sketches, as the single fossil crumbled to dust more than a century ago – for a sauropod rivaling the size of a blue whale, or Amphicoelias fragillimus, which would have been 40-60 meters) in length and weighed 131 tons.
Sauropods had peg-like teeth that were adapted for stripping leaves from trees. They didn’t use them for chewing, but rather had numerous large stones in their stomachs, called gastroliths, which ground up the leaf matter and helped digest it. Sauropods were a very successful suborder as they were able to reach high leaves that no other type of dinosaur would have been close to reaching.
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