Barapasaurus

Chapter • Meet the dinosaur

Overview

Barapasaurus was an early long-necked sauropod roughly 14–18 metres long, with body-mass estimates between about 7 and 15 tonnes. It walked on four pillar-like legs, and the thigh bone alone measured around 1.7 metres. The neck was long but not as extreme as in later sauropods, and the tail was carried clear of the ground, held out horizontally as a counterweight. Its back vertebrae bear deep hollows on the sides – an early stage in the air-filled, weight-saving vertebral system that later sauropods perfected. Like all sauropods, Barapasaurus had no feathers; the skin was probably covered in small, non-overlapping scales. Movement would have been steady rather than fast. Biomechanical work on sauropods of this size suggests walking speeds of about 5–8 km/h and a maximum of perhaps 15 km/h. The long neck let the animal sweep across a wide feeding area without shifting several tonnes of body, an energy-saving trick that helped make gigantism possible. Barapasaurus was a plant eater. The few teeth found alongside the skeletons are spoon-shaped with coarse serrations, well suited to stripping and cropping conifer shoots, fern fronds and twigs rather than chewing them. Food was swallowed whole and broken down by fermentation in a huge gut. Likely plants on the Early Jurassic menu included conifers, cycads, ginkgophytes, ferns and seed ferns. The fossils were excavated between 1958 and 1961 from the Kota Formation of the Pranhita–Godavari valley in present-day Telangana, India, and the species was formally described in 1975 by Sohan Lal Jain, T. S. Kutty, Tapan Roy-Chowdhury and Sankar Chatterjee. The material comprises roughly 300 bones from at least six individuals, though no skull and no feet have been recovered. Even so, Barapasaurus remains one of the most completely known early sauropods and a key witness to how the giants arose already in the Early Jurassic.

Chapter • Where it lived

Habitat

Barapasaurus lived in the Early Jurassic, roughly 196–183 million years ago, in what is now central India. Every specimen comes from the Kota Formation of the Pranhita–Godavari valley in Telangana (formerly Andhra Pradesh), where sandstones and mudstones were laid down by braided rivers and on floodplains. The setting was warm and seasonally wet, with river channels, lakes and forests of conifers, cycads and ferns. The same beds have yielded fish, early mammals and the second Indian sauropod, Kotasaurus.

Chapter • Wild behavior

Behavior & Ecology

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Chapter • Scientific place

Taxonomy