Sauropods were the biggest dinosaurs — and the biggest land animals — ever to stomp across the planet. Their long-necked group included apatosaurus, brontosaurus, camarasaurus and the even more massive titanosaurs, whose leg bones were longer than a person is tall.
But each of their first steps on Earth were teensy. These great beasts came from little packages, hatching out of eggs no bigger than grapefruits or soccer balls. They must have had "a ridiculous growth rate," said D. Cary Woodruff, director of paleontology at the Great Plains Dinosaur Museum in Montana.
Woodruff knows how small these animals began — along with a team of dinosaur experts, Woodruff describes the smallest diplodocus skull ever found in a new study in the journal Scientific Reports.