London, May 27 (Inditop): New findings have suggested that 150 million years ago, giant dinosaurs known as Sauropods, may have held its head higher for much of the time.
According to a report by BBC News, by studying the skeletons of living vertebrates, Mike Taylor, from the University of Portsmouth, and his team, reshaped the dinosaur’s resting pose.
Dr Taylor said he is not suggesting that museums should re-pose their long-necked sauropod skeletons from the current horizontal position to a more upright posture.
“The diplodocus in the main hall vestibule of the Natural History Museum is in a perfectly good posture,” he told BBC News. “It’s one within a whole range of movement that would have been entirely possible,” he added.
But, after studying X-rays of members of 10 different vertebrate groups, Dr Taylor is convinced that when they were not reaching down for a drink, the sauropods stood with their heads held very high indeed.
With their necks aloft, like giraffes, the dinosaurs would have towered up to 15m above the ground.
Dr Taylor and his colleagues found that the necks of mammals and birds – the only modern groups that share the upright leg posture of dinosaurs – are “strongly inclined” vertically.
“Our approach was embarrassingly straightforward,” said Dr Taylor. “We looked at real animals, and at the whole animal,” he added.
According to Paul Barrett, from the Natural History Museum, bones can only give us so much information, and the soft tissue in the animal’s huge neck could “enable greater flexibility than the bones alone suggest”.
Some of the earliest reconstructions of sauropod skeletons – in the late 19th and early 20th Century – were posed with erect necks, so the idea is not new.
“It’s largely in recent years that this view has changed,” Dr Taylor said. “But, we can be confident that they held their heads upright,” he added.
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