Longest Neck of Any Animal Is More Times Six Times Longer Than a Giraffe’s
Sauropod dinosaurs have captured people’s attention since their relatively complete fossils were first discovered in the United States in the late 1800s. Recently, a team led by a Stony Brook University palaeontologist, Dr Andrew J. Moore, and Professor Paul Barret (a Merit Researcher from London’s Natural History Museum) discovered that a Late Jurassic Chinese dinosaur had a 15-metre-long neck. The dinosaur, known as Mamenchisaurus sinocanadorum, had a neck longer than six times a giraffe’s and 1.5 times the length of a double-decker bus!
The M. sinocanadorum was discovered in 1987 in around 162-million-year-old rocks from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of northwest China by the China-Canada Dinosaur Project team. Even though the species is only known from a handful of bones from the neck and skull, scientists were able to reconstruct its size and shape with help from the skeletons of its closest relatives.
For sauropod dinosaurs, long necks were one of the key things to achieving a large body size. Sauropods had to be efficient when gathering food to power a large body, which is where the long necks come in. They could stand in one spot and feed on the surrounding vegetation while conserving energy. Long necks also possibly allowed sauropods to shed excess body head by increasing their surface area, like elephants' ears.
APA Bibliography
https://scitechdaily.com/longest-neck-of-any-animal-ever-new-fossil-analysis-reveals-dinosaur-with-50-foot-neck/
https://news.sky.com/story/dinosaur-had-longest-neck-ever-seen-in-an-animal-scientists-say-12834438
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/press-office/press-releases/new-fossil-analysis-reveals-dinosaur-with-the-longest-neck-of-an.html#:~:text=Now%20an%20international%20team%20led,15%2Dmetre%2Dlong%20neck.
