BRACHIOSAURUS

You're about to discover one of the biggest creatures that ever walked on Earth. Meet the brachiosaurus, which was a dinosaur that lived during the late Jurassic period. Learn about the life of the big brachiosaurus.

The Big Brachiosaurus

The brachiosaurus must have been terrible at playing hide-and-seek. When your body is as big as two school buses, there's nowhere to hide!

The brachiosaurus (pronounced BRACK-ee-uh-SAWR-us) was a huge dinosaur that walked the Earth about 150 million years ago during the mid- to late Jurassic Period. Scientists estimate that the brachiosaurus may have weighed between 28 and 62 tons and measured 85 feet in length. That's a gigantic dinosaur!

What Did They Look Like?

The brachiosaurus had a big, heavy body and a very long neck. Image if a giraffe and an elephant had an enormous baby, and you get some idea of what a brachiosaurus looked like. On top of its neck, which was about 30 feet long, was a small head that had a ridge of bone on top and a large set of nostrils, which might indicate it had a good sense of smell.

Having a long neck is a feature of all sauropods, which is the type of dinosaur that the brachiosaurus belongs to. Sauropods, in general, are large dinosaurs that liked to eat plants.

The thick tail on the brachiosaurus was short compared to that of other sauropods. The dinosaur walked on all fours, but unlike most other dinosaurs its front two legs were longer than its back legs. Its unusual legs might explain how the brachiosaurus got its name; the prefix brachio means arm, and the suffix saurusmeans lizard, so the brachiosaurus was a lizard-like creature with strange arms.