Troll_Man

WWD: Brachiosaurus altithorax

Added 2023-04-23 01:38:12 +0000 UTC

Oh boy, here we go. The biggest animal to feature in the episode, even if its role is little more than a glorified cameo just to show off a cool dinosaur, which was, at the time, thought to be the biggest land animal. And for sure, even if not the very biggest, it still was a very large animal, standing over fifty feet tall and weighing up to forty-five metric tonnes. It actually sucks just how tall it is because it is single-handedly more than doubling the height of the size chart because is it so much taller than everything else.

Surprisingly, despite the species' popularity, it is not known from good remains. In fact, all known fossils are very fragmentary, and together piece together nowhere near a complete skeleton. Most of Brachiosaurus' popularity and depictions instead stem from its close relative, Giraffatitan, which was long thought of as an African species of Brachiosaurus, and is known from far more complete fossils. This includes the WWD depiction of the species, as Giraffatitan as a separate genus was not widely accepted until a full decade later.

WWD uses old mass estimates for Giraffatitan (and by extension, Brachiosaurus), which sometimes put it at nearly eighty metric tonnes, putting it up there as one of the largest animals to ever walk the Earth. However, such extreme size estimates are now considered unreliable, since they did not take into account that sauropods were riddled with air sacs which lightened themselves considerably. It's also portrayed with nostrils on its forehead, a depiction that still continues to this day, but it is much more likely that it actually had large fleshy sinuses covering its distinctive domed skull, and its nostrils were near the tip of the snout like most reptiles.