Page 24 - Blue Valley_Issue 1_2022

NATURE

STRETCHING THE

IMAGINATION

BY JAMES CLARKE, PHOTOGRAPHS BY MARY BROADLEY

“There ain’t no such animal!” discovered long-necked dinosaur that defies
– overheard at Bronx Zoo when an elderly the imagination.
woman saw a giraffe for the first time in her life.
Long-necked? Just two of its almost dustbin-
sized vertebrae were the length of an entire
“Taller than an elephant giraffe’s neck.
but not so thick”
– definition of the giraffe in Samuel Johnson's Fossil hunters now call it ‘Supersaurus’ – a name
invented by a fellow journalist reporting on the
1775 Dictionary of the English Language. event. This new dinosaur is the longest four-
legged creature that has ever lived. It weighed
here is no doubt that, if the giraffe were around 60 tons and was at least 40m in length.
known only through the discovery of its
Tfossilised neck bones, it might well have The first of its bones were discovered in the
been deemed to be another bizarre creation of 1970s, when they were thought to be the
the weird Jurassic Period – the era that produced remains of two dinosaurs. Now palaeontologists
creatures with the most unlikely necks. believe they belonged to one animal.

Just before Christmas, the American Society of Try to imagine this creature walking in city
Vertebrate Palaeontology, at its annual meeting traffic, dwarfing double-decker buses, haplessly
in Minneapolis, revealed details of a newly squashing cars underfoot and stretching to

Masai giraffe

22 • Issue 1 2022 • BLUE VALLEY NEWS