New week, new animal!

Pencil drawing courtesy Dr. Adam Smith (www.plesiosauria.com)

When thinking of a new animal of the week I thought of this guy. Who is he? Well the nostril placement, which is quite accurate, narrows this lumbering cow down to two general choices (unless you're as into dinosaurs as most of us are and know that the more popular choice would have higher nostrils), one of which we've studied already. We studied, previously, the Brachiosaurs. The other choice, which we will study this week is the genus Camarasaurus!

Camarasaurs are large sauropods found throughout the Morrison formations in Colorado and Utah. In the late Jurassic era these animals were the giraffes of their day. Their principal predators were most likely packs of Allosaurus, as these animals were rather large and hard to take down and, in fact, a pelvis from Dinosaur National Monument in Utah bears evidence of an Allosaur attack. The type species for this genus is C. supremus, so many of our entries this week may fall back on this animal.