A true super lizard inhabited our planet Earth about 155 million years ago, in the Jurassic period. This animal, officially called Supersaurus, turns out to be a specimen that was placed inside the Diplodocus sauropods.

The territory of North America was the habitat of this specimen. Besides, it is convenient to point out that this specimen is among the most gigantic among all the specimens known as diplodontidae, being in a very probable way the animal that has the longest length among all of them.

Taxonomy of the Supersaurus

• Within the Animalia Kingdom
• Phylum or division: Chordata
• He belongs to the Sauropside Class
• This dinosaur is in the Superorder Dinosauria
• He belongs to the Order Saurischia
• Within the Sub-order Sauropodomorpha
• It belongs to the Infraorden Sauropoda
• This dinosaur is in the Diplodocratic Family
• Belongs to the subfamily Apatosaurinae
• Within the Genus Supersaurus

Characteristics of Supersaurus

About the physical specifications of this enormous specimen we can clarify that due to the great number of vestiges it has come to calculate that this dinosaur could get to measure more than 30 meters in length.

As for its weight we can see that it does not exceed 40 tons, meanwhile, we can see that the skull of this creature was relatively small if we compare it with the rest of its corpulence. It also had quite powerful extremities, and we could see the existence of a rather long tail.

Another interesting detail of the animal is that it was quite similar to another specimen, the Apatosaurus, due to the corpulence of both specimens, both presented a quite resistant and solid chest.

Likewise, the latter enjoyed ribs long enough to withstand several onslaughts without suffering serious damage, not to mention the wide neck that served to further increase the strength of these specimens.

However, the robustness of the dinosaur featured in this article was actually somewhat lower than that of the famous Apatosaurus, the size being the slightest differentiator, in addition to other elements known as vertebrae, precisely those located right in the area of the neck.

These elements were much more elongated in the Supersaurus than in the Apatosaurus, so we can clearly see that the neck area of the first was much more elongated than the neck area of the second animal mentioned.

At first the vestiges of the main dinosaur were not abundant, in fact only were found, with much luck, a bone element belonging to the waist and another bone element identified as coracoid scapula (scapula with bony protrusions around the scapula that allow a greater fixation of the muscles).

It was even calculated that it was approximately 240 centimeters long, in addition to some other vertebrae that were found in the Morrison Formation, in the state of Colorado.

However, after a while it was possible to find with much luck a fairly complete bone structure, which was confirmed that it belonged to the Supersaurus itself, this structure was given the funny nickname of ‘Jimbo’, which was found in Converse, in the state of Wyoming, also located within the United States of America.

At present these complete remains are still being studied and unearthed, we can even see a large number of them exposed in a place known as the “Dinosaur Center”, located in the same American state mentioned above.
At the beginning of all the research related to the Supersaurus, it was thought that this specimen was a direct relative of the Diplodonates, even that it was a quite close relative of the Barosaurus itself.

However, after several studies carried out with the required procedures, it was demonstrated and proved beyond any doubt that this specimen was actually much more related to a dinosaur called Apatosaurus, and whose family is officially called Apatosaurinae.

Discovery of the Supersaurus

It all started in 1975, when some traces could be seen in the Morrison formation.

Supersaurus Feeding

What is undeniable about this animal is the type of food it carried, it is certain that this specimen based its diet on the consumption of vegetables in large quantities, in fact it has been estimated that this creature probably came to ingest more than two and a half tons of plants during the 24 hours of the day, a really fantastic figure.

Because of the heavy weight of this creature, it is more likely that its usual environment would have been made up of land, otherwise, if it had moved through swampy areas, it would probably have ended up at the bottom of those areas.

In addition, there is the possibility that this animal did not use its teeth to grind, but simply swallowed the food so that the stomach organ would do all the work, because it is presumed that it had the famous stomach stones, which performed this functional activity, the gastrotrocytes.

On the other hand, the dental elements of this specimen were rather used to extract the vegetable food from where it was inserted.

It is also almost a fact that what this specimen ate was not different from conifers and horsetails, so that these vegetables could be located in the soil itself, and it is also presumed that even the grasses could have been the preferred food of this great and mysterious animal called Supersaurus.