Dino profile
Brachiosaurus
the long-necked giant that ate from the treetops
Brachiosaurus was a sauropod, a very big long-necked dinosaur that ate plants. Its front legs were longer than its back legs: so its shoulders were higher than its hips.
Its ID card
- Its size
- About 18 to 22 meters long, and probably 9 to 13 meters tall, according to estimates. [1][2]
- What it ate
- Leaves from tall trees: conifers, tree ferns, and probably also ginkgos and big cycads. [1][2]
- Its family
- The sauropods, the big long-necked plant-eating dinosaurs. More precisely, the brachiosaurid family. [1]
It eats way up high
It mostly ate leaves more than 5 meters above the ground, and maybe up to 9 meters high. [2]
Its teeth were a bit like spoons. It didn't chew: it swallowed the leaves whole. Then they fermented in its gut to be digested. [1][2]
It needed a lot of food: probably 200 to 400 kilos of plants a day, according to one estimate. [2]
A long neck, but held how?
Scientists are still debating the position of its neck. Did it hold it straight up, or more level with the ground? [2]
Some think its neck wasn't flexible enough to stand straight up. Others think it couldn't keep it level for long. [2]
It lived in an area of plains, with a dry season and a rainy season. Other dinosaurs lived there, like Allosaurus, Stegosaurus, Apatosaurus and Diplodocus. [2]
Its discovery
In 1900, Elmer Riggs's team, from the Field Columbian Museum in Chicago, finds part of a skeleton near Fruita, Colorado. This fossil is still kept in that museum, which has become the Field Museum. [1][2]
In 1903, Riggs gives it its name: Brachiosaurus altithorax. The second name refers to its very deep, very wide chest. [1][2]
No complete skeleton has ever been found. Brachiosaurus is even rare: far fewer of its fossils are known than those of other sauropods from the same time. [1][2]
Many pictures of Brachiosaurus are based on its African cousin, Giraffatitan, found in Tanzania. For a long time, people thought it was the same animal. In 2009, a study showed that they are two different dinosaurs. [1][2]
Sources
The information on this page comes from these sources:
- Brachiosaurus, Dino Directory, Natural History Museum, London (accessed November 5, 2026).
- Brachiosaurus, Wikipedia (English), and the publications it cites: Riggs 1903, Paul 1988, Foster 2003 and 2007, Christian & Dzemski 2007, Stevens & Parrish 1999, Taylor 2009, Hallett & Wedel 2016 (accessed November 5, 2026).