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Dinosaur Reproduction, Not Ancient Gravity, Allowed Super-Sized Sauropods to Evolve

Why was Supersaurus so big? This impressive, 100-foot-plus sauropod was one of the largest creatures to ever walk the Earth – far larger than any terrestrial animal alive today. What could account for such superlative size?

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Apatosaurus
Apatosaurus was a huge dinosaur, but some sauropods grew even larger.

Why was Supersaurus so big? This impressive, 100-foot-plus sauropod was one of the largest creatures to ever walk the Earth – far larger than any terrestrial animal alive today. What could account for such superlative size? Baseball player Jose Canseco offered his own hypothesis on Twitter a few days ago.

After promising to share some of his thoughts on gravity, Canseco cemented his reputation for weird tweets by outlining his thoughts about why there’s nothing quite so big as Supersaurus around anymore:

Plenty of bloggers picked up onthe armchair speculation, and science communication star Bill Nye even chimed in. But there was something totally missing from the various responses – science.

Writers with time to kill picked out Canseco as an easy target worth a bit of ridicule, but neglected to explain why the sports star was wrong. Snark is easier than substance. That’s a shame, especially given the growing amount of literature about why dinosaurs – and sauropods in particular – got to be so mind-bogglingly...

Read the rest of this article on NatGeo.com
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