The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: The Sunday Times Bestseller, The Untold Story of a Lost World

by Steve Brusatte

It all starts with the neck. The long, spindly, slinky-shaped neck is probably the single most distinctive feature of sauropods. A longer-than-normal neck started to evolve in the very oldest Triassic proto-sauropods, and it got proportionally longer over time, as sauropods both added more vertebrae—the individual bones in the neck—and stretched each individual vertebra ever further. Like Iron Man’s armor, the long necks conferred a kind of superpower: they allowed sauropods to reach higher in the trees than other plant-eating animals, giving them access to a whole new source of food. They could also park themselves in one area for several hours and extend their necks up and down and all around like a cherry picker, gobbling up plants while expending very little energy. That meant they were able to eat more food, and thus take in energy more efficiently, than their competitors. That’s adaptive advantage number one: their necks permitted them to eat the huge meals necessary to put on excessive weight. Then there’s the way that they grew. Recall that the dinosauromorph ancestors of dinosaurs developed higher metabolisms, faster growth rates, and a more active lifestyle than many of the amphibians and reptiles that were also diversifying in the earliest Triassic. They weren’t lethargic, and it didn’t take them aeons to grow into adults like an iguana or a crocodile. This was also true of all of their dinosaur descendants. Studies of bone growth indicate that most sauropods ma...