Thursday, October 16, 2008

Toy Box Inspiration: Dinosaurs, Part Two

(cross-posted to JH&S)

To recap, I am identifying dinosaurs found in my nephew's toybox. Because I am desperate for material.

Second dino:
dino2.JPG
(click for dino-size)

What we have here is a mighty herbivore that I grew up thinking was the Brontosaurus, but which is actually a Brachiosaurus. There is no such thing as a Brontosaurus! The guy who found the "Brontosaurus" skull mistakenly identified it as belonging to a new species, but it was really the skull of the already-discovered Apatosaurus, which looks a lot like a Brachiosaurus, but has a much longer tail. Confused yet?

Anywho, the Brachiosaurus was featured as the "veggiesaur" in Jurassic Park that sneezed on Lex. The dino in the movie was more anatomically correct than the dino in the toy box. Brachiosaurus has longer forelimbs than hindlimbs, much like a giraffe. Possibly the toybox version above is some other sauropod, but based on the skull shape and tail length, I'm sticking with Brachiosaurus as my identification here.

Brachiosaurus was one of the biggest dinosaurs and weighed in at around 35 tons. (Completely unrelated link to something else weighing 35 tons.)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I believe this is a diplodocid, from the late jurrasic - i have the same dinosaur toy, and have looked over its features and found that they best match those of a diplodocid. Hope this helps :)

Jennifer Fink said...

Now there's a good idea for inspiration! The sad thing is that I was eagerly reading along, checking to see if my dinosaur knowledge matched. Yep -- after 4 boys, I know my dinos well! :)

Jenny
http://bloggingboutboys.blogspot.com/