Vulcanodon

What it was like

Vulcanodon was one of the earliest known sauropods, already built along familiar lines: four column-like legs, a long neck, and a long tail. At about 6.5 meters (21 feet) long, it was far smaller than the giant sauropods that came later in the Jurassic and Cretaceous.

Only a partial skeleton has been found, missing the skull and most of the neck and trunk. For years scientists mistook curved, blade-like teeth found near the bones for its own, and pictured Vulcanodon as an omnivore. Those teeth are now thought to belong to a meat-eating dinosaur that may have fed on the carcass, and Vulcanodon is understood to have been a plant eater like other sauropods.

Its world

Vulcanodon lived from about 200 to 184 million years ago, in the Early Jurassic, in what is now Zimbabwe. Its bones come from the Forest Sandstone.

It lived alongside early dinosaurs such as Massospondylus, Megapnosaurus, and Thecodontosaurus, at a time when sauropods and their close relatives were still working out the body plan that would carry the group through the rest of the Mesozoic.

How it was found

Raath named Vulcanodon in 1972, and the type species is Vulcanodon karibaensis. It is known from a single find, which has made comparisons with relatives such as Isanosaurus, Kotasaurus, and Ohmdenosaurus difficult, since none of these early sauropods and near-sauropods are known from complete skeletons either. Together they show that the classic sauropod body plan was already falling into place near the start of the Jurassic, even while much about each individual genus remains uncertain.