LUMBERING Diplodocus with its long neck and massive body is an iconic dinosaur. It belongs to a group known as sauropods, which includes the biggest animals ever to walk the Earth. Some of these monsters weighed more than 120 tonnes, but equally impressive was the length of their necks. At up to 15 metres, they were more than six times as long as a giraffe's.
How did sauropods evolve such extraordinarily long necks? That's the sort of question you might expect palaeontologists to discuss after dinner. Which is exactly what Mathew Wedel and Mike Taylor did one night at Taylor's house. Hauling out their laptops to look at other impressive necks, they noticed a striking pattern: in all other land animals, living and extinct, necks top out at about the same length. For everything excluding the sauropods, there seemed to be a limit of about 2.5 metres. That piqued the ...
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