Description
Apatosaurus was a sauropod dinosaur that lived during the Late Jurassic Period (about 152 million years ago) in what is now western North America. It was a large animal, being at least 70 feet in length, ad weighted about 20 tons, but some old adults were probably a lot bigger.
- Scientific Name: Apatosaurus
- Characteristics: Apatosaurus was a large quadrupedal dinosaur with a long neck and whip-like tail. Like most sauropods, it had a stout body, and its front legs were slightly shorter than its back legs. It was once thought that large sauropods like Apatosaurus would have been too heavy to have supported themselves on land, so were forced to float themselves in water. We now have fossil footprints that show that this is incorrect – they walked on land, although not very quickly, with top speeds of less than 20 miles per hour.
- Size and Color: This model is 13 inches long and 5 inches high. It is medium gray on top and a light cream underneath. Such coloring would not have camouflaged the Apatosaurus very well, but this isn’t that important for such a large animal.
- The Apatosaurus is part of the Wild Safari® Prehistoric World collection
- All of our products are Non-toxic and BPA free
History
The history of Apatosaurus is confusing. The first skeleton, found in the 1870’s to be found lacked a skull. Although some bones of its skeleton looked a lot like Diplodocus, which lived at the same time, other bones looked more like another dinosaur called Camarosaurus’ . This made it difficult to figure out exactly where Apatosaurus fit in with other dinosaurs. We now know that the skull of Apatosaurus looked more like Diplodocus than Camarosaurus’ , so we able to put Apatosaurus and Diplodocus in the same family. Problem solved. Another confusion surrounding Apatosaurus is that we at one time thought that Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus, another dinosaur that lived at the same time, were the same dinosaur that had been accidentally given two names. In 2015, a new study showed that although Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus are very similar, they are actually two different dinosaurs.
- Size in cm: 33 L x
- Size in inches: 12.99 L x
- UPC: 095866300401
