How in the world do you lose a 200-foot-long dinosaur?
It’s disconcerting when you can’t find a favorite Christmas tree ornament that your family has enjoyed for 50 years. But to lose your dinosaur! Oh, Amphicoelias!
[Holy cow, I just almost lost the post about the lost dinosaur!]
If you can imagine these, you can imagine anything.
Imagine a land animal as long as two basketball courts laid end to end. Take your time: you’ll have to stretch your imagination pretty far.
Now imagine losing that animal!
Really! How do you misplace a 9-foot-long dinosaur backbone? It’s this bone that allows scientists to estimate the length of the living creature as somewhere around 200 feet. I wonder how many of these beasts you could herd onto Guam before you made the island capsize.
But the bone has been mislaid! All we have are drawings and measurements made of it back in the 1870s. Just not the same as the real thing!
God does like to challenge our imaginations, doesn’t He?
Jambo! Mr. Nature here, with today’s safari into the incredible. Maybe even the preposterous.
Once upon a time, or so they say, there was a dinosaur–a sauropod, like a brontosaur or Diplodocus–that grew to be 200 feet long. Twice as long as an NBA basketball court. Edward D. Cope named it Amphicoelias. With all the new discoveries, in recent years, of super-sized sauropods all over the world, interest in Amphicoelias has been renewed.
The key piece of this dinosaur was a single vertebra 8.9 feet long. And sometime after 1878… it got lost.
Now, how do you lose a 9-foot-long dinosaur bone? It’s not like it could have slipped behind the couch. What kind of dingbat loses something nine feet long? “I coulda sworn I had it in this closet, with the Christmas tree ornaments…” “It somehow got lost when we moved…” Really!
We still have drawings of this bone, made by scientists who studied it, but who wants to take the kids to a museum to see drawings?
And so a land animal as long as two blue whales laid end-to-end… is lost. Like a spare set of car keys. Like that carefully boxed complete set of 1961 baseball cards that should be up on that shelf in your bedroom, but isn’t. Alas and alas!
We can only hope it turns up in someone’s garage someday.