Apatosaurus: Your Dinosaurs Are Wrong #12

Kiwi frog requested that I do brontosaurus fortunately friend of the geek group named Thomas gave me this well brontosaurus on the grounds that I returned it to him when it's done I am more than happy to oblige for a couple of reasons most prominently brontosaurus is still even though t-rex has sort of eclipsed tit for Americans it's still synonymous with the term dinosaur in the popular culture and it kind of always has been since its discovery we haven't actually done a sauropod yet on the show a truth or a pod we did play via Soros but that's kind of weird sauropods are sort of V dinosaur right when dinosaurs were the dominant creatures on land that's when sauropods rose to prominence and they were around until the Late Cretaceous so a hundred and twenty million years as the the top vertebrate herbivore on land is nothing to sneeze at they're also the largest land vertebrates to ever walk the earth so yes let's let's talk about these guys varta Soros was found in the Morrison Formation of Wyoming Colorado area in 1879 by auth Neal Charles Marsh it wasn't found by him he described it ask me about the bone Wars sometime we could do a whole episode about that but Marsh described it as Thunder lizard because of the sound that it would make as it walked we now know this to be inaccurate but it's still a cool freakin name and that's why I still call it brontosaurus its proper name is Apatosaurus which means deceptive lizard and because that name has precedence over brontosaurus because we later found that brontosaurus was not a distinct genus some people still think that it is a distinct genus the way Marsh did but I point out that Marsh was way more interested at the time in naming as many genre as he could in order to win the rivalry then he wasn't actually making sure that these genre were all distinct he also named one of the specimens Atlantis auras which is also a really cool name but we can't use that either because it's synonymous with Apatosaurus all of that said I still like calling it brontosaurus because as previously mentioned it's such a cool name and people know what you mean when you say brontosaurus it's like calling all pterosaurs pterodactyls it's not accurate but people know what you mean for the layman that's enough I understand the need for having distinctive binomial nomenclature type names for all creatures that's how the scientific community operates but for the layman and for the dinosaur fans we really should just stop yelling at people for calling it brontosaurus guys I mentioned that it's been a fixture in popular culture pretty much since it was described because I'm an animator I feel like I'm obligated to mention that Winsor McCay was one of the first animators working with hand-drawn animation as opposed to cutout sir or what have you made one of the first motion picture animations featuring a brontosaurus called Gertie the dinosaur it was a very inaccurate depiction of Gertie the dinosaur but it was ahead of its time in every respect like like technically just not in the depiction of the actual creature so with all of that ranting out of the way let's get to why this depiction is inaccurate it's actually really consistent with this painting that was very famous done by Charles Knight for the American Museum of Natural History featuring a brontosaurus at the time it was thought that these animals were far too large it was the size of like 3 to 5 elephants they were too large to live on land so they must have been semi aquatic like when they weren't in the water so that the water could support their bulk they would barely be able to move on land they would be these sluggish tail dragging the same narrative of natural history that I've been ragging on this whole series as of the 1970s we know that based on the work of backer and cooms and a lot of others they were not aquatic creatures they were highly adapted land creatures like they were depicted at the time in the early part of the 20th century with splayed toes this sort of classic bell curve posture to the spine dragging tails sprawled gait with with with the arms just outstretched like a like a crocodile or a lizard and and really not be active elephant like creatures we now know them to be I say elephant like referring to their mode of locomotion and not necessarily to their lifestyle though it's not terribly inaccurate to say that they lived like elephants as far as we know brontosaurus had a very deep chest more so than other Diplodocus at least where this guy has endorsed aliyou he's about round he's an egg shape for the torso whereas in life or for a real one it would have been much deeper than he is wide and and in some specimens it's actually quite rectangular the the ribcage at least but when you give it and accurately proportion to chest suddenly it has to be digging ditches in the ground in order to support the the sprawled limb posture that that people like to give it which means that in order to be consistent with the observed specimens you have to give it an upright straight posture and you have to take it out of the swamps now you'll frequently see restorations that sort of look like they have an arched spine as opposed to the more straight spine that I'm pushing the neural spines on brontosaurus were really really high the the vertical part of the vertebra and they were highest in the very middle of the back about halfway between the front limbs and the hind limbs so it would have had a sort of arch to it but it wasn't because the spine was arched it was because the spines on the spine were arched since we're talking about posture I will mention that the legs are way too short if we're going to move them under the creature we should also lengthen them and the feet are portrayed as plantigrade which is consistent with what they thought at the beginning of the twentieth century but we now know is inaccurate it also has not the right number of toes it should have five toes each the front feet were relatively typical of sauropods they were half moon-shaped if you were to look at a footprint of them it really did resemble nothing so much as a hoof but a hoof made of flesh rather than hoof they had only one claw on the first digit and it was relatively large and stuck out in words towards the center of the creature and the rest of the toes didn't have any claws on them at all they were they were one bone so it was this solid pillar thing supporting the the front limbs of the creature and I'm I can't sit up straight enough to put my arms straight but imagine that my arm is just going straight up into me similarly the hind feet would also be digitigrade is what we call that when it's on its digits its digitigrade when it's on its heels it would be plantigrade like us the first three toes on the hind feet had claws the the first of which was the largest they they angled outwards and again these are probably more like in ostriches hooves than they would be like talons they they were probably for locomotion not combat behind feet however were more like an elephant or a stegosaur what-have-you where they were supported by a fleshy pad as well as the toes the front limbs are proportionally much shorter than the hind limbs but as previously mentioned the limbs are way too short the the fore leg should be the same length maybe a little shorter than the femur the tail is too short the tail is not as disproportionately long as you might see in other de plata kids like Diplodocus where it's like twice the length of the neck on Apatosaurus it was maybe a 3 to 2 ratio there's a theory that is amusing but maybe not terribly accurate that it would use its incredibly long incredibly skinny tail it its tail was slightly unique in that it tapered really abruptly it had what I want to call it a concave fall-off - it's the width of its tail but towards the tip it was so long and skinny that it might have used it as a bullwhip and and there were there was a mechanical analysis that it could break the sound barrier with the tip of its tail the way you break it with a bullwhip and that would make a sound for communication purposes and as cool as that is other people have pointed out that that would really hurt the tail to be doing that and it bears repeating the tail should not be on the ground should be relatively straight out and rather muscular especially at the base the head is rather terrible they've they've sort of tried to be faithful to the profile view but completely screwed over the dorsal view in dorsal view de plata kids in general and Apatosaurus specifically had very square skulls they had wide mouths in the front this is portrayed with basically a beak whereas not only did it not have the cheeks that you would see in other herbivores dinosaurs it didn't even have terribly advanced teeth it had pegs at the front of its mouth and we figured that it used its wide mouth with its many little tiny teeth as a pair of rakes to just pull the foliage off of plants because it pre-process it's food at all it didn't chew it it didn't have a gizzard that we know of it just swallowed it all and let the gut take care of everything so the head was really just a grabbing device to bring food into the gut and consequently the head was tiny it the animal as I said was the size of a few elephants the head was the size of a horse's head so this head is far too large it's it's not postured terribly badly though I don't like the eyebrow ridges but it would definitely have defaulted to having its head at a at a right angle to the neck it could move its head down further or up higher if it needed to but its rest position was not dissimilar to this I should mention the nostrils the nostrils were where you would expect them they're at the front of the head but the NARAS the hole in the skull that accommodates the air passages is in between the eyes it's on top of the head and for a long time it was ibotta sized that that's where the nostrils were so when we thought that this was an aquatic creature that made perfect sense because they're like oh that's a snorkel it can it can have its entire body submerged and just have its head poking out of the water and snorkeling if you were ever a stupid kid who saw a garden hose and a snorkel and decided hey I can swim on the bottom of the pool you know how well that works or rather how terribly that works and I hope you didn't drown don't try that I'm really lucky point is the snorkel idea is dumb the current theory is that it was merely a fleshie resonating chamber running from the top of the head to the nostrils at the front of the head so it was four honking like so many other cranial structures on dinosaurs and finally we get to the neck I saved this for last because sauropod neck posture as I mentioned in the Plateosaurus episode is one of those things that reminds us how young the field of paleontology really is in the grand scheme of things there have been attempts at rigorous mechanical analyses of the the morphology of sauropod necks it's infuriating because they keep going back and forth on it is it rigid or is it flexible is it rigid in the middle and and flexible at the ends would it have held its head high would it have held its head near the ground would it it even had the ability to pump blood to its head if it held its head high these are questions that have been addressed and we've gone around in circles on them as far as I can tell from the available materials this posture with its head off the ground in sort of an alert it this Toro toy is kind of worn out because Elisabeth put a hat on it for months and it weighed it down but it doesn't seem like it's unreasonable for for a brontosaurus to hold its head high in an alert pose even though its default pose would be much closer to the horizontal Diplodocus a kind of unique among the Soraa skins because the the cervical ribs which are those long bony struts that seem to support the neck our surprisingly short in animals with necks this long this has implications for the musculature of the neck not entirely clear on what those implications are however it might mean that the neck is more flexible because there's less restricting it from bending whichever way it wants to but it might also mean that the neck is weaker because cervical ribs seem to be ossified tendons which means that they're used for attaching really strong muscles the reason I mention all of this is because the neck is the reason supposedly that sauropods were able to grow to the size they were and be so such successful land animals for as long as they were having a long flexible neck with a tiny head that doesn't have to process your food before you swallow it into your massive gut means that you can feed really really efficiently it means that you don't have to move your massive body around in order to clear a large area or inter cording to some studies a large volume in three dimensions of foliage and instead of envisioning these sluggish heavy swamp-dwelling creatures that can barely lug their own weight around and have to survive on soft water plants we have these highly efficient highly specialized land dwelling herbivores that are large enough that they have no natural predators mind you just at the opposite end of that activeness spectrum and I should add that when researching this episode I came across a tidbit that I wasn't aware of in 2006 or according to some reports 2008 I haven't seen as much material on this as maybe I should in the Morrison Formation they found track waves from Apatosaurus from from little baby Apatosaurus and they have walking track ways where they're walking on their forelegs just like an adult would but they have running track ways from baby Apatosaurus pata swords pata sores that we're running on their hind limbs with their with their four limbs just tucked up the way you would expect you know a pro sauropod or a Plateosaurus or even an ordinate is key in dinosaur to run active less like a reptile more like a giant bird is the take away on this one I hope that was satisfactory Thomas and kiwi frog thank you for watching your dinosaurs are wrong please remember to Like comment and subscribe suggest dinosaurs for me to have on the show you could even send me a toy dinosaur our addresses in the description go to the geek group org to find out how you can become a member and donate and we'll see you next time this video is made possible by a grant from the Future girl foundation this video is made possible by thousands of private donations from members and viewers like you please visit the geek group o-r-g for more information on how you can donate and become a part of our dreams of Avalon I believe so yes whoo late Jurassic

Channel: Chaotic Good

Views: 164,039

Rating: 4.9452667 out of 5

Keywords: the geek group, geekgroup, tgg, steven bellettini, dinosaur, dinosaurs, dinos, dino, apatosaurus, brontosaurus, thunder lizard, fossil, fossils, prehistoric, prehistory, jurassic, triassic, cretaceous, extinct, extinction, kid safe, kid friendly, child safe, child friendly, educational, science videos, sauropods, gertie the dinosaur, neck, skull, paleontology, makerspace, hackerspace, grand rapids, michigan, MI, toy, toys, anatomy, anatomically correct, ydaw, evolution, evolved, herbivore, omnivore, winsor mccay

Id: iPvxoGJAqEc

Length: 19min 10sec (1150 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 26 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/BeastForm]

This show is awesome. I watched every episode after seeing the Therizinosaurus one posted recently. Thanks for letting us know when a new one is up!

[u/Albertosaurus]

Keep it up love these

[u/repofangirlie]

Team Apatosaurus.

[u/[deleted]]

The phrase "It was for honking" gave me quite a bit of delight for some reason

[u/Hector_Kur]

You should have an episode about Velociraptor, preferably with any toy that drew inspiration from Jurassic Park.

This is a great video series, by the way! I'm completely hooked.