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🦴 Known fossil material
Parts found as fossils
- Shoulder girdle and chest
- Arm or front leg
- Pelvis
- Hind leg
Converted automatically from the Paleobiology Database's specimen records and not checked by a person. Those records mostly list measured limb bones and skulls, so this shows only some of the bones that have been found.
Coloured areas have at least one bone in PBDB's specimen records. Faint areas are not in those records, which does not mean they have not been found. The outline is a general shape for its group, not this dinosaur's real body.
Apatosaurus
Name meaning: From Greek, meaning "deceptive lizard", because some of its bones looked like those of a marine reptile.
📏 About 22 m long and over 20 tonnes, heavier than three or four African elephants.
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Apatosaurus was a long-necked sauropod from Late Jurassic North America and a close relative of Brontosaurus. Its neck was unusually thick and broad, and its body far bulkier than that of Diplodocus.
Fun facts
- Apatosaurus was named in 1877, during the "Bone Wars", when two palaeontologists raced to name new dinosaurs.
- For decades museums mounted Apatosaurus skeletons with the wrong head, until it was corrected in the late 1970s.
Who lived alongside it
Dinosaurs found in the same rock formation as Apatosaurus (Morrison), so they lived in the same region at roughly the same time.
Allosaurus
Camarasaurus
Stegosaurus
Diplodocus
Camptosaurus
Nanosaurus
Dryosaurus
Brontosaurus
Formation data from the Paleobiology Database, counting only each genus's main formations. One formation can span hundreds of thousands to millions of years, so this doesn't mean any two of them ever met.
Scientific details
- Classification
- Sauropodomorph (long-necked)
- Family
- Diplodocidae
- When it lived
- 143.1–157.9 million years ago
- Geologic stages
- Unknown
- Named by
- Marsh, 1877
- Fossil occurrences
- 67 sites
Countries with fossils
- United States
Data from Paleobiology Database and Wikidata