Our planet was, for hundreds of millions of years, dominated by one group of animals only: dinosaurs. They lived everywhere from Antarctica to the equator ; from western Europe to southeastern Australia , exploiting almost every terrestrial niche and quite a few aerial ones to boot. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

It’s strange, then, that we know so little about them. Oh, sure, we know how they looked – more or less, anyway – and what they ate, stuff like that. But how did they act? How did they move ? A new study suggests the answer isn’t quite what we were taught – at least in the case of the gargantuan Giraffatitan .

The tale of the tail

Imagine a sauropod – the often gigantic, always long-necked,

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