40 Fun Facts About Brachiosaurus

Animators on Jurassic Park based the walk of Brachiosaurus on the gait of which living animal?

Giraffe movement was the model, scaled up to a far heavier body. It suits the fossils: the overall build of Brachiosaurus resembles that animal more than any other alive today.

Where did scientists once wrongly believe Brachiosaurus spent most of its time?

Partly underwater was the old picture, with the water holding up all that bulk. In 1904 its discoverer argued that hollow backbones and long limbs were built for dry land, and he was right.

What does the name Brachiosaurus mean, built from two Greek words by the scientist who described it?

Arm lizard fits because its front limbs were longer than its hind ones, the reverse of most of its long-necked relatives. That gave it high shoulders and a back sloping down to the tail.

Which organ of Brachiosaurus may have weighed about 400 kilograms because of its towering height?

Heart size had to be huge: it pumped blood all the way up to a brain held many metres above it. Curving the neck into an S-shape shortened that climb by more than 2 metres.

What record did the discoverer of Brachiosaurus claim for it in the titles of his first reports?

Largest known dinosaur was the boast in 1901 and again in 1903. Only about a fifth of the skeleton had been found, so nobody tried to mount it for almost a century.

Which animals' songs were mixed with cow and donkey calls to voice Brachiosaurus in Jurassic Park?

Whales supplied the melody, picked to give the herd a sense of wonder even though the real animal probably had limited vocal ability.

The digital Brachiosaurus from Jurassic Park was later turned into the rontos of which film series?

Star Wars reused the model as the starting point for the rontos added to the 1997 special edition of A New Hope, four years after the dinosaur's screen debut.

Which large bony openings sat on top of the skull of Brachiosaurus rather than at its snout tip?

Nostrils set that high have sparked odd ideas: some researchers proposed a trunk, others a fleshy crest, and one theory says the bony arch helped cool the brain.

As a high browser, Brachiosaurus is thought to have cropped leaves up to how far off the ground?

30 feet, about 9 metres, was within its reach. It probably fed mostly above 5 metres, which kept it out of competition with the shorter plant-eaters living nearby.

In which stretch of geological time did Brachiosaurus live, roughly 150 million years ago?

Late Jurassic rocks about 154 million years old held the first skeleton. Brachiosaurus shared that world with other giants such as Diplodocus and Apatosaurus.

To which group of long-necked, plant-eating giants such as Diplodocus does Brachiosaurus belong?

Sauropods all shared a long neck, a huge body and pillar-like legs, but Brachiosaurus broke one family habit: its tail was short for its size.

Which meat-eating dinosaur sat at the top of the food web in the world Brachiosaurus lived in?

Allosaurus made up 70 to 75 percent of the meat-eater fossils in those rocks. A smaller hunter, Ceratosaurus, may have gone after the smaller Brachiosaurus.

Which famous plant-eating dinosaur actually lived alongside Brachiosaurus in western North America?

Stegosaurus shared the habitat with smaller plant-eaters such as Camptosaurus and Dryosaurus, while Brachiosaurus browsed far overhead.

In which US state was the first Brachiosaurus skeleton dug up in 1900, near the town of Fruita?

Colorado's Grand Junction area drew the museum crew, and the small hill where they dug now carries a plaque marking the spot.

What was Brachiosaurus poorly built to do because its weight sat so far forward on its body?

Rear up on hind legs is how other long-necked dinosaurs may have tripled their feeding height. Brachiosaurus would have gained only a third more, at the cost of enormous strain on its hips.

Which of these plants, still alive today, do scientists think was on the menu for Brachiosaurus?

Ginkgos grew beside conifers, tree ferns and cycads in its habitat, and it likely ate them all. One study put its appetite at 200 to 400 kilograms of plants a day.

What did Brachiosaurus do with the leaves it nipped off, judging by its up-and-down jaw motion?

Swallowed them unchewed, then left the work to its gut, where the food fermented. By one estimate it took up to six bites a minute.

Popular images of Brachiosaurus are mostly based on a close cousin dug up in which African country?

Tanzania yielded far more complete skeletons, first labelled a species of Brachiosaurus. A 2009 study counted 26 bone differences, and the African animal is now treated as a separate dinosaur.

The tallest mounted dinosaur skeleton, long labelled Brachiosaurus, stands in which city's museum?

Berlin's Natural History Museum holds the Guinness-certified record holder, pieced together from bones collected on expeditions between 1909 and 1912.

The first Brachiosaurus bone was spotted from horseback in 1900 on which American holiday?

Fourth of July, 1900, was the day a field assistant found the giant limb bone and declared it the biggest thing yet. The crew then left it for three weeks to dig up a better-looking skeleton.

Which American fossil hunter named Brachiosaurus in 1903 after digging it up for the Field Museum?

Elmer Riggs was the Field Museum's first paleontologist, a specialist in fossil mammals who was hired in part to bring home dinosaurs for display.

A cast of the Brachiosaurus skeleton left the Field Museum in 1999 to stand in which airport?

Chicago O'Hare put the plastic skeleton in United's Terminal One. Much of it is sculpture: the missing bones were modelled on those of its African cousin.

Which famous Tyrannosaurus skeleton took the place of Brachiosaurus in the Field Museum's main hall?

Sue arrived as the museum's new centrepiece, and the Brachiosaurus that had towered over the hall since 1994 was moved out to make room.

During the dig, the giant upper arm bone of Brachiosaurus was first thought to be from where?

The thigh seemed the obvious home for a bone over two metres long. Only after the fossil was cleaned in the lab did it turn out to belong to the front limb.

A tip from a man of which profession in Grand Junction led the museum crew to Brachiosaurus?

Dentist Stanton Bradbury, an amateur collector, wrote that dinosaur bones had been turning up near town since 1885. The museum then risked five hundred dollars on an expedition.

What shape were the teeth of Brachiosaurus, set in broad jaws that cropped mouthfuls of leaves?

Spoon-shaped, chisel-like teeth suited a feeder that nipped without being choosy. Each upper jaw bone had room for fourteen or fifteen of them, more than in its African cousin.

Which bird-like structures hollowed out the backbone and ribs of Brachiosaurus, lightening its body?

Air sacs linked to the lungs spread through the neck and trunk and ate into the bones. They also pushed air one way through the lungs, as in birds, and may have shed extra heat.

What kind of space object, first spotted in 1991, carries the official name 9954 Brachiosaurus?

An asteroid in the main belt took the name in honour of the dinosaur, which has been called one of the most iconic of them all.

The species name of Brachiosaurus, altithorax, points to which feature of its body?

Its deep chest, unusually roomy even for a giant, inspired the name: Latin altus for deep plus the Greek word for a breastplate.

A skull now assigned to Brachiosaurus was used by O. C. Marsh in 1891 to restore which dinosaur?

Brontosaurus was drawn with the borrowed head in his famous skeleton restoration. The skull, reported by a farmer in 1883, was only described as Brachiosaurus in 1998.

Rocks holding Brachiosaurus fossils record what kind of landscape, with wet and dry seasons?

Semi-arid floodplains were mostly treeless, with forests hugging the rivers. Tall conifers were scarce, which may explain why Brachiosaurus was rarer here than its cousin was in Africa.

For its body weight, the daily food needs of Brachiosaurus were comparable to which living animal's?

An elephant also eats roughly 1.5 percent of its body mass a day. For a forty-tonne Brachiosaurus that meant about half a tonne of leaves, gathered over sixteen hours of feeding.

Which parts of Brachiosaurus were built as a puppet for close-ups with actors in Jurassic Park?

Head and neck were all the animatronic needed, for the scene where a Brachiosaurus meets the children in a tree. It was also the first computer-generated dinosaur shown in the film.

Which record-size fossil, possibly from a Brachiosaurus, was reported from Wyoming in 2018?

A foot bigger than any other known from a long-necked dinosaur came out of the ground there. It is also the most northerly trace of the Brachiosaurus family in North America.

Which long-necked dinosaur is the most common in the rocks where Brachiosaurus is found?

Camarasaurus turned up 179 times in one survey, against 12 for Brachiosaurus. Its family is known to have migrated with the seasons, so Brachiosaurus may have done the same.

Brachiosaurus fossils come only from which famous dinosaur-rich band of rocks in the American West?

Morrison Formation rocks span several western states and have yielded Brachiosaurus bones in Oklahoma, Utah and Wyoming as well as at the first site.

A European species once named Brachiosaurus atalaiensis, now Lusotitan, was found in which country?

Portugal's fossils, found at Atalaia in 1947 and named a decade later, were moved into a genus of their own in 2003.

About how fast is Brachiosaurus estimated to have walked on its long, slender, column-like legs?

3 mph, a steady plod, is the estimate. Its torso was too stiff to bend from side to side, so the long limbs did all the work.

Newer research suggests Brachiosaurus had which trait, once thought unlikely for so large an animal?

Being warm-blooded was ruled out in 1989 because such a giant would supposedly overheat. Later work found the old sums used the wrong body weight and too little cooling surface.

When filming the first Brachiosaurus scene in Jurassic Park, what did the actors actually look at?

An X on paper marked where the animal's face would be, since the dinosaur was added by computer later. Empire magazine went on to rank the scene among cinema's most magical moments.