Scientists believe that the titanosaur It grows fast And they don’t slow down until they reach enormous adult sizes. “When we compare their growth rates throughout life [those of] live animals, they are closer to the growth rates that we observe in whales. It was very fast,” said Rogers.
Rogers added that, unlike whales, titanosaurs did not benefit from consuming the high-protein, nutritious milk provided by their mothers. Instead, these dinosaurs foraged for their own food. “Keeping their growth rates high is one way most sauropods differed from their carnivorous dinosaur relatives, which seems to have stunted their growth a lot as they aged.”
And while titanosaurs were the largest sauropods, Carano points out that their common ancestry among sauropods was enormous. “The evolution to 70-80 tonnes from a 20-30 ton ancestor probably didn’t require much evolutionary innovation,” he said. This shows that all structures and systems are in place to achieve high volume success.
Skywalker, field assistant at Altitude Science Institute for Natural History Exploration, who conducted fieldwork in Montana and Wyoming. “This allows them to have a varied diet, which gives them access to a variety of nutritious foods,” he said.
Due to their increased size, sauropods developed “air” air sacs in their bones, to make their skeletons lighter. “These air sacs are made up of soft tissue attached to the lungs,” says Walker. “This makes their weight easier to bear and allows for a more efficient supply of oxygen throughout their body. Unlike mammals, sauropods got this blessing because there was almost no limit to how far they could grow.”
Predatory dinosaurs It had pneumatic air sacs, much like modern birds, Carano said, and these sacs may have evolved from a common ancestor. However, it is also believed that they have it developed independently in other groups, including pterosaurs and sauropods. “This will increase the breathing capacity and soften this large bone without sacrificing its strength.” Carano explains that sauropods had short legs and column-like limbs to support their great weight. “These are all extreme features in the largest titanosaurs,” he said.
Titanosaurs also had hidden adaptations in their joints. Smaller, like non-avian dinosaurs t-rex They have tight joints where their bones fit neatly together, just like ours. In contrast, titanosaurs had joints with enormous spongy cartilage at the ends of their bones. These differences in joint structure, especially in major limb joints such as the hip, he said, were thought to be adaptations to maintain the body weight of the larger animals.
However, according to Carano, what is less clear is how the titanosaurs managed to outpace their sauropod ancestors. Maybe they just had more time to develop bigger bodies, after the departure of their Jurassic ancestors. On the other hand, they may have come up with a new innovation – modifying existing anatomy to make it bigger. “But there are not so many differences to make the answer clear. It is also possible that they benefited from the availability of new foods, particularly flowering plants, which were not present in the Jurassic period,” said Carano.
The jury is still out on whether titanosaurs might have gotten bigger if the dinosaurs hadn’t gone extinct.
“I think there may have been somewhat larger sauropods, but not significantly,” said Carano. He says it helps to think in terms of “order of magnitude,” which technically refers to changes by a factor of ten, to think about large changes in scale. For example, going from 1 ton to 10 tons is a big deal, he says—much more than going from 10 to 20 tons. “There was a shift in scale in the former but not in the latter.”
