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Barosaurus

Barosaurus ("heavy lizard") was a giant, long-tailed, long-necked, plant-eating dinosaur directly related to the more familiar Diplodocus.

Characteristics Barosaurus was a large but rather typical diplodocid that lived during the Late Jurassic period, around 150 million years ago. In fact, in many compliments Barosaurus was very similar to Diplodocus itself, but with slight differences: much longer backbones (vertebrae) a shorter tail, and a much longer neck. Although its neck bones (cervical vertebrae) numbered 15 in total, just as in Diplodocus, some of them were more than 1 m (39 in) long. The scoops and hollows in their arrangement mean that the neck as a whole was probably light.

Probably more than four-fifths of this plant-eater's total length of perhaps 27 m (90 ft) was neck and tail. Most probably it had a small head, although no specimen of its skull has been recovered.

The American Museum of normal History in New York City shows the skeleton of a "mother" Barosaurus rearing on her hind legs to an enormous height to protect her offspring from a small Allosaurus. Her head would be level with the fifth story of a building.

The Barosaurus long neck was build to live in the high air, like a giraffe. In order to pump blood to the brain the heart must have biased about 3,200 lbs. (1.6 t). The bigger a heart is, the slower it beats. Therefore the blood would run back to the heart before it reached the brain. Because of that, there's another theory that the Barosaurus had 8 hearts: Two in the chest and three pairs in the neck, which all worked together. Another theory says that it had some artery-blockades, which reduced the blood to run back. The enormous neck had 16 vertebras; some of them were over 3 ft. (1 m) long, but hollow. If they had not been hollow, it would not have been able to lift its neck from the earth. It was so tall, that if it stood on its back legs, it could look over a five-storey building.

Just like the Apatosaurus, it used its tail to protect itself. The Barosaurus had to stand up on its back legs to defend itself, while swinging its tail or stomping the attacking dinosaur.

Discovery

Barosaurus is one of the many sauropods exposed in North America during the "Wild West Dinosaur Hunts" (the "Bone Wars") of the late 19th century. Othniel Charles Marsh named it in 1890. The name is also applied to specimens once classified in the genus Tornieria.

Starting in 1922, three fairly complete Barosaurus skeletons were dug out of Carnegie Quarry, Utah, by a team lead by Earl Douglas of the Carnegie Museum of normal History, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Earlier, he had excavated Apatosaurus from the same site, and had been involved in setting up the Dinosaur National Monument there in 1915.

More Barosaurus remains were exposed in South Dakota and, more recently, pieces of skull, limbs and other fragments of a sample from Tanzania in East Africa have also been assigned to Barosaurus.