One of the most amazing things about sauropods was their growth rate. If humans grew as fast as sauropods, you would have gone from weighing 7 pounds at birth to weighing 90 pounds by the time you were two months old! Scientists still don’t know how these animals grew so big so quickly. It’s another way that dinosaurs are completely unlike creatures alive today.

Amargasaurus
(Ah-MAR-guh-SOR-us)

Egg
Like all dinosaurs, sauropods hatched from eggs. Some of the eggs were about the size of an ostrich egg, while others were about the size of a volleyball.

Young
Predators like T. rex didn’t mess with adult sauropods— they were too big to attack. But predators might have tried to make a meal of the young sauropods. Young sauropods likely stayed near the giant adults. And like the adults, they probably spent a lot of their day looking for food, too.

Adult

Big animals like elephants spend a LOT of time eating, anywhere between 10 and 14 hours a day. It’s likely that sauropods spent most of their days eating, too. The food that sauropods ate did not give them a lot of energy. This means they had to eat more food to get the energy they needed.

I guess I can’t babysit if the “kids” are as big as me!