What is it about?
This study suggests that many giant plant-eating dinosaurs (sauropods) became enormous because they had to travel long distances to find food and water during dry seasons. In a world with strong wet-dry cycles, being bigger helped them walk farther, range over wider areas, and survive droughts—much like today’s elephants and giraffes, but on an even grander scale. Using simple scaling rules from living animals, the authors estimate how far two sauropods could roam. An adult Turiasaurus riodevensis—one of Europe’s largest dinosaurs, weighing ~40–48 tonnes—could likely forage within a circle about 144 km in radius (an area roughly the size of Ireland). A smaller Camarasaurus lentus (~14 tonnes) still had an impressive ~100 km radius (about the area of Rwanda). These estimates fit with fossil trackways and bonebeds that hint at herd travel and occasional mass deaths during extreme droughts. The paper also proposes that some unusual features—very tall back spines and large nasal openings—may have helped these dinosaurs store energy (fat) and conserve water while on the move in hot, semi-arid landscapes.
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Why is it important?
The work links climate, movement, and body size into a single, testable idea: repeated seasonal droughts favored bigger bodies because large animals can travel farther and cope longer when local resources run out. This helps explain why the biggest sauropods appear in warm, seasonal environments and adds a practical angle to long-running debates about “why dinosaurs got so big.” It complements other explanations (like anatomy and metabolism) by showing how everyday survival—finding food and water—could drive evolution toward gigantism. The paper also makes specific predictions (e.g., where giants should be found, what features they might share) that future fossils and modeling can check.
Perspectives
In my view, the most striking takeaway is how a simple reality—walk far enough to find the next green patch—can scale up to shape the biggest land animals of all time. I’m especially intrigued by the idea that tall back spines and enlarged nasal passages weren’t just for show; they might have been “travel gear” for life in seasonal, thirsty worlds. I hope readers see this as an invitation to test movement-based ideas more directly—combining trackways, isotopes, and biomechanics—to map where these giants likely moved and how often. It’s a refreshingly down-to-earth explanation for truly outsized bodies.
Andrés Santos-Cubedo
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Did large foraging migrations favor the enormous body size of giant sauropods? The case of Turiasaurus, Spanish Journal of Palaeontology, June 2024, Universitat de Valencia,
DOI: 10.7203/sjp.28176.
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