This morning’s Random Object was a Brachiosaurus… well, a toy version that could hide under your coffee mug.
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The real Brachiosaurus was one of the tallest dinosaurs to ever walk the planet, I found it ironic trying to draw a toy version that was so small! I talked about how these sauropods lived around 150 million years ago, back when the continents were still tearing themselves apart. Their long front legs gave them the name “arm lizard,” and both the North American Brachiosaurus altithorax and the African Giraffatitan brancai shared the same high-nostril skull quirk.
We also looked at their sheer size. A full-grown Brachiosaurus could stand about 40 feet tall and stretch 80 feet long. That is as long as a blue whale but only about one fifth of the whale’s bulk. You would need to stack five Brachiosauruses to match the whale’s volume, which would give paleontologists an instant 50 percent boost in known specimens.
That led us into the reality check. For all the books and movies showing endless herds, there are only twelve good specimens in the world. That means a lot of “facts” about them are just educated guesses. We even compared them to giraffe herd sizes, probably closer to a dozen or two in a group, not tens of thousands. And for all their supposed success, nature never bothered to copy their body plan into anything else after they were gone.
From there, we traced their late entry into pop culture. Discovered in 1900 and named in 1903, they missed the early dinosaur movie craze entirely. It wasn’t until the 1970s and 1980s, with shows like Land of the Lost, toy lines from the British Museum of Natural History and Safari Ltd., and the general Gen-X dinosaur boom, that they started getting real attention. That set the stage for Jurassic Park and Michael Crichton’s cautionary tale about genetic tinkering. And, just like in the movie, today’s biotech companies are busy wondering if they can bring back extinct animals without stopping to ask if they should.
Click here to watch the Brachiosaurus episode of Sketch & Coffee, Live!
Also, if you or a teacher friend are in need of a 20-30 minute lesson plan about Brachiosaurs, here is one for free:
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