Sauropod habits and habitats

The reciprocal interaction of angiosperm evolution and tetrapod herbivory

“…Dinosaur dietary inferences were taken from Coombs (1975) (sauropods); Weishampel (1984a,b) and Norman and Weishampel (1985) (hadrosaurids); and Ostrom (1966) (ceratopsians). Dietary inferences for mammalian herbivores were taken from the literature or based on cusp height and "crestiness" of molar teeth, and degree of specialization of incisors and/or premolars.…”

“…Large bodies and long necks would presumably have permitted them to browse 10-12m above the ground (Bakker, 1978). Many sauropods appear to have been terrestrial (Dodson et al, 1980), and their feeding behavior is thought to have involved removing shoots or branches with their rake-like dentitions (Coombs, 1975). Sauropods probably lacked chewing capabilities, the teeth being widely separated and showing no signs of tooth-to-tooth occlusion.…”

Articulated bone sets of manus and pedes of Camarasaurus (Sauropoda, Dinosauria)

“…However, since the discovery of the first articulated manus (Osborn, 1904;Hatcher, 1902), it is known to have evolved a tubular arrangement in eusauropods, with an almost vertically oriented and only distally slightly spreading metacarpus (McIntosh, 1990a;Upchurch, 1998;Wilson and Sereno, 1998;Wilson, 2002Wilson, , 2005aUpchurch et al, 2004a;Harris, 2006;Carballido et al, 2012b). As Coombs (1975) and Thulborn (1990) stated, such a manual shape bears more affinities to hippo or rhino forefeet than to the ones of elephants, but with their reduced carpus and phalanges, they remain without exact modern analog, which makes them difficult to understand and reconstruct. Recently, Senter (2010Senter ( , 2011 suggested that also thyreophorans might exhibit similar metacarpal configurations.…”

“…Both of these assumptions are advantageous in distributing the weight evenly to all five digits, because cartilage is more flexible than bone (Knese and Biermann, 1958;Wilson and Sereno, 1998;McGowan, 1999). However, the packing of the bony carpals into thick layers of hyaline cartilage has been rejected by several authors, because this sort of cartilage was argued to be insufficiently vascularized to maintain its functionality under such heavy loads (Bunim, 1956;Larson, 1962;Coombs, 1975;Currey, 1984;Bonnan, 2000Bonnan, , 2003Apesteguía, 2005). Therefore, Christiansen (1997c) proposed that cartilaginous elements in the sauropod carpus, if present, rather consisted of fibrocartilage, which is less susceptible to stresses but still enough compliant, and thus even better suited to disperse the weight more effectively than bone (Jaffe, 1972).…”

“…It has a fairly uniform shape (Carrano and Wilson, 2001), and was much more elephantine than the forefeet in having a cushioning pad and a semidigitigrade stance (Osborn, 1899;Sikes, 1971;Thulborn, 1990;Christiansen, 1997c;Upchurch et al, 2004a;Milàn et al, 2005;Wilson, 2005aWilson, , 2005bMiller et al, 2008). Unlike the condition present in elephants, eusauropod hind feet are asymmetrical and generally exhibit three large claws on digits one to three, which point somewhat laterally and are often interpreted as anti-slipping devices (Coombs, 1975;Farlow, 1992;Wilson, 2002Wilson, , 2005aWilson, , 2005bUpchurch et al, 2004a;Bonnan, 2005), or to have been used for scratch-digging (Gallup, 1989;Fowler and Hall, 2011;Tschopp et al, in press). The pedes of SMA 0002 confirm these previous interpretations.…”