Ampelosaurus

What it was like

Ampelosaurus was a titanosaur, a long-necked plant eater, about 15 meters (49 feet) long. That is small for a titanosaur, and it may reflect life on islands, where food was limited.

Like several of its relatives it carried bony plates called osteoderms in its skin. Some of these were large and spiny, a kind of light armor on a long-necked giant.

Its world

It lived about 84 to 66 million years ago, in the Late Cretaceous, in what are now France and Spain. At the time much of southern Europe was a chain of islands. It shared that land with the plant eater Rhabdodon and the meat eaters Arcovenator and Variraptor.

How it was found

Le Loeuff named Ampelosaurus in 1995, after bones found near vineyards in southern France, which gave it its name. Five finds are known, some with many bones, though not every bone from the main site may belong to this one animal.