PALAEONTOLOGY: BREAKTHROUGH STUDY REVEALS HOW SUPER-MASSIVE DINOSAURS GOT SO BIG

The sauropods were the largest animals to ever walk on Earth. A new study explains how they got that way

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Back when our ancestors were just rat-sized creatures crawling along the floors of prehistoric forests, super-giant sauropod dinosaurs browsed the treetops. But how, and when, did they get so big? Palaeontologists at Adelphi University, in the US, have figured out that they reached their exceptional sizes in order to fill the available niches, and that they managed it by evolving many more times than previously thought.