What are Sauropods?
Sauropods are a suborder of Saurischia (“lizard-hipped”), one of the two categories of dinosaur, the other being Ornithischia (“bird-hipped”). Sauropoda is one of the two great lineages of herbivorous dinosaurs alongside Ornithischia, which includes duck-billed dinosaurs, triceratops, stegosaurus, and many others. Sauropods are famous for being the largest land animals in the history of life on Earth. Sauropods first emerged in the late Triassic period, 200 million years ago. The first sauropods were small by sauropod standards — 5 m (16 ft) in length, and a few meters tall, weighing about a ton. The early sauropods would have been roughly the size of an elephant. They would have been able to avoid predation due to their sheer size. Sauropods also possess long, tapering tails, which many paleontologists believe could have been cracked like a whip, producing sonic booms as loud as 200 decibels. Computer simulations have shown this would have easily been within the animal’s capabilities.
