It probably did not walk so firmly as the skeleton suggests, but
sprawled in the swamps or swam like a hippopotamus. But the
Diplodocus is neither the largest nor heaviest of its family. The
Brontosaur, though only sixty feet long, probably weighed twenty
tons. We have its footprints in the rocks to-day, each impression
measuring about a square yard. Generally, it is the huge
thigh-bones of these monsters that have survived, and give us an
idea of their size. The largest living elephant has a femur
scarcely four feet long, but the femur of the Atlantosaur
measures more than seventy inches, and the femur of the
Brachiosaur more than eighty. Many of these Deinosaurs must have
measured more than a hundred feet from the tip of the snout to
the end of the tail, and stood about thirty feet high from the
ground. The European Sauropods did not, apparently, reach the
size of their American cousins-- so early did the inferiority of
Europe begin--but our Ceteosaur seems to have been about fifty
feet long and ten feet in height. Its thigh-bone was sixty-four
inches long and twenty-seven inches in circumference at the
shaft. And in this order of reptiles, it must be remembered, the
bones are solid.
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