Europasaurus - Prehistoric Creatures #2

When we hear or read the word "dinosaur" usually pictures of gigantic and terrifying creatures that used to live million years ago come to our mind. What if I tell you that apart from enormous dinosaurs, many smaller ones like the dwarf dinosaur that we will discover today also existed. What? A dwarf dinosaur? Like Frodo Baggins? Well no, maybe they were some other species that had the size of Frodo but not the dwarf Europasaurus, Europasaurus was a lot bigger. Also I need to make clear that Frodo was a hobbit and not a dwarf, if you do not know what a hobbit is then shame on you.

So now back to our dinosaur, Europasaurus was a herbivorous dinosaur which lived about 154 million years ago in Northern Germany. Many parts of it’s skeleton were discovered at the mountain Langenberg near the city of Oker, Germany in 1995. Today all of those skeleton parts are stored in Dino-Park Munchehagen near Hanover which by the way is on my check list as a future destination. The dinosaur’s name means "reptile from Europe" and honors the discoverer Holger Ludtke who found the specific fossils.

However, it’s name doesn’t make clear why I earlier called this dinosaur a dwarf so let’s find out. Europasaurus belongs to the genus of sauropods, sauropods were usually long necked creatures with very small heads, massive bodies and long tails. Their back legs were thick and powerful and the front legs were slender and looked like hands in order to support their weight. As we can see, the most characteristic feature of sauropods was their size. In contrast, Europasaurus was not even half of it’s ancestors, this is something called "Insular Dwarfism". Million years ago Northern Europe consisted of many small islands, it seems that some of Europasaurus ancestors migrated to those small islands, which weren’t able to support such huge dinosaurs like sauropods due to lack of food resources, forcing them to depreciate in size in order to survive. An adult Europasaurus measured about 6m/19ft in length and youngsters about 3.7/12ft to 1.7/5.6ft respectively.

If we were to try to visualize Europasaurus today we could compare it with a mule in height and with a cow in weight. So if you owned a farm and dinosaurs weren’t extinct you could easily had it as a farm animal, the only problem is that dinosaurs don’t produce milk, or do they? Well a new theory from Paul Else (Wollongong University, Australia) states that some dinosaurs species produced a kind of milk for their offsprings, this is based on the fact that some birds today feed their babies with a milk-like substance and since birds and dinosaurs share so much in common, this could also be true for dinosaurs. Dino-milk, yummy! Who needs a cow, right?

As I couldn’t find a scientific video about Europasaurus on Youtube, I provide a link to Matthew the Dinosaur King youtube channel where he is making a presentation of a Europasaurus toy figure, it is a short video and I think you will love it.