Photo by Fausto García on Unsplash Right now, giraffes are the tallest animals on Earth. Growing to a height of up to 6m, they're huge, right!? Now, imagine 3 giraffes all stood on top of eachother. Seems silly but that's the estimated height of the tallest dinosaur – Sauroposeidon [1]. Animals of this size haven't roamed the Earth since the extinction of the sauropod dinosaurs ~145 million years ago, not even the more recently extinct megafauna were so big. Now, why is that? What made the dinosaurs so special that they were able to grow so large? One suggestion as to how these creatures managed to tower over others is that they were, well, full of air. Okay, maybe not quite ‘full’, but the fossilised bones of various dinosaur species have shown evidence of pneumatisation (the presence of air). Sauropods especially have been found to have had a large number of air sacs in their vertebra. What does this have to do with height? Well, the presence of air sacs in
Are you left glassy-eyed by geography, puzzled by parasitology or befuddled by botany? Welcome to one PhD student's lowdown on just a snippet of what's going on in the world of science.