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11thEarlOfMar

It could step over an elephant:

https://paleontology.us/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/David-Att...

from:

https://paleontology.us/titanosaurus/

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Interestingly in the 2nd link that they have this creature towering over the local flora.

The long neck makes more sense if there are trees that size and the neck is to get to the leaves. Otherwise what use is it?

It's just a render. The other graphic shows it reaching a height of 45 feet off the ground; modern trees far exceed that frequently.

Two at least.

1. You can graze a wide radius without actually moving, which seems pretty energetically efficient.

2. Cooling. The neck is a lot of surface area to dissipate heat. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3812985/#!po=50...

giraffes have super long necks and yet they bend over to eat. The answer is runaway sexual selection (or at least that's the answer wrt to giraffes).

Giraffes also reach up to eat.

(They do look quite funny when bending down to drink, though!)

I used to live in Tanzania and over there, the trees are mostly shorter than the giraffes, but I'm sure they reach up to eat sometimes. I guess my point was that giraffes didn't evolve long necks to eat.

They have long legs to eat, and a long neck so they can still drink while having long legs

This centuries-old question is still not settled, right?

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160629-giraffes-did-not-evo...

This article confuses me. Why does it make the scientists out to be on opposite sides of the aisle? A giraffe that wins a neck to neck fight is also one that may have better chances of finding food high up a tree when resources are scarce - both can lead to better survival and hence passing of genes. It's not one or the other, it can can be both.

The weight estimate on that website has to be way off.

A male elephant can weigh up to 7 tons and they say that Titanosaurus would have weighed around 13 tons. Even with much lighter bones & co., at that size there's no way it would have weighed that little. A mammoth could weigh up to 12 tons, as another point of comparison.

A dinosaur like the one they depict would have weighed at least 50 tons, IMO.

I'm familiar with many non-standard measurements, but neither Google nor my dictionary is able to tell me what's a "skipful".

Anyone would like to give me the definition in SI?

"Skip" is British English for "container" [1].

Of course they come in various sizes, so it means anything from 1.5 m³ to just over 6 m³. A very rough measure, in other words, which makes sense in context.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skip_(container)

"Skip" is actually British English for "dumpster"

D'oh! Killed by a false friend [1]! Thanks.

("Container" is both "container" and "dumpster" in Swedish, and it's pronounced pretty much as "container" in English since it's a loan word, but the meanings have diverged, I guess.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_friend

Even on dry land? I thought we were leaning towards most of these giant sauropods being waders?

What was it eating? Whole tree canopies? Those animals must needed amazing amount of land to sustain, even though cold blooded.

Unlikely, I would think. An elephant could walk under it, but “stepping over” IMO would require it to be able to lift both its front and back feet by the height of an elephant (and make steps the width of an elephant, but that, I think is feasible).

How high a hurdle can an elephant clear? I know they can put their front feet on a pedestal that’s, ballpark, ½m, but I don’t see them step over one.

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