Giant Dino Skeleton Once Forgotten, Now Found

"No big sauropods were ever collected in Canada," Evans clarified. "We're mostly famous for our Cretaceous period, Alberta-region dinosaurs, like T. rex, Triceratops, Parasaurolophus (a duck-billed dino), and Centrosaurus," which had a nose horn and small hornlets on a frill.

The American Museum of Natural History is the only other major museum in the world to have a Barosaurus on display.

AMNH spokesman Ken Kostel told Discovery News that their dino went up around 20 years ago. The dinosaur is shown in a dramatic pose, rearing on its hind legs with its neck stretched high. The New York museum's website admits the pose "is a product of the human imagination."

The problem is that researchers now doubt the dino, with its 39-foot neck, could have pumped sufficient blood to the beast's tiny head, if the animal were to have held its neck in an upright position.

Roger Seymour, an Adelaide University Department of Environmental Biology researcher, said the left ventricle alone from the heart would had to have weighed over 4,400 pounds to pump the blood, if Barosaurus were a warm-blooded dinosaur. Even if it had been cold blooded, its metabolism would have needed to be ultra low to maintain a vertical neck.

When the Barosaurus makes its public debut this December, sharing space with T. rex, Triceratops and Stegasaurus skeletons, it will be shown with its neck in a horizontal position, making its enormous body size seem all the lengthier.

Related Links:

Royal Ontario Museum

American Museum of Natural History

American Museum of Natural History: Barosaurus

The Sauropod Dinosaurs