Speculative sauropods

If you travel in the same circles I do, you probably know that my friend and colleague Mark Witton is working on a speculative biology book, Dinosaurs Evolved, that takes a fresh look at what life on Earth might be like now had the asteroid missed and the K-Pg extinction never happened. As a lifelong spec-bio fan, I’m stoked for that project. Speculative sauropods have given me a lot to think about, especially in the past few years, so I thought it would be fun to revisit some in this post. Maybe all? There aren’t a ton of examples. If you know of any I missed here, sing out in the comments. (I’m not including any from the Speculative Dinosaur Project out of lack of familiarity — the project was basically dead by the time I would have started following it — and I’m not sure any are currently accessible anyway.)

Rather than proceeding chronologically, I’m going to start with my favorites and proceed in the direction of the most-loathed, for reasons that will become apparent later on. Back in 2010, Memo Kösemen kindly let us — Mike, Darren, and me — debut his Brontosapiens here on SV-POW!, and give our thoughts on it. I’m not going to say much about this critter in this post, mostly because I think our ideas from 16 years ago hold up pretty well, and you can just go read the original post if you’re curious.

Of course the OG speculative sauropods are the ones dreamt up by Dougal Dixon for The New Dinosaurs (1988), the recent reprint of which I reviewed here. In addition to the ones shown above, there are a couple more in the book: a dwarf island sauropod, which we now know actually happened more than once, and the Rajaphant, which is basically an unremarkable large titanosaur. Of the ones in the above spread, the Lumber has a trunk and is actually built for it, unlike any real-world sauropods discovered so far, and the Turtosaur takes titanosaur osteoderms to their logical conclusion. I like ’em both. The box on the far left shows the skeleton of a group of slender-bodied running sauropods that flourished only briefly during Dixon’s alternate Cenozoic.

I’m not going to say much about the brontosaurs in Peter Jackson’s King Kong (2005), because they’re not really attempts at spec bio, but rather deliberately old-fashioned Charles R. Knight/Rudolph Zallinger-esque productions realized in CG. I’ll say of the movie that it has a lot of dinosaurs but not particularly interesting ones; if you thought that the Jurassic Park/World movies were too realistic and you’d prefer your dinosaurs to look like cliches from decades past and act like voracious monsters, King Kong has you covered. That said, as monster fights go, King Kong vs. three V. rexes is a banger.

Much more interesting from a spec bio perspective is a book that accompanied the movie, The World of Kong: A Natural History of Skull Island. It explains the fictional evolutionary backstory of the Skull Island critters from the movie, both the ones that made it to the screen, and many others that did not. Among those never realized on screen are two sauropods. The first, shown above, is Asperdorsus (“rough back”), which has spines on its back and hanging from its neck. This is pretty much just a spiny Diplodocus and it wouldn’t surprise me if someone dug one of these up in Montana while I was writing this post.

Then there’s this thing, Diablosaurus, which I have an almost visceral dislike of, for many reasons. First off, it’s boring. It’s just a dinosaur squeezed into the shape of a rhinoceros. In a world with the full-tilt wackiness of actual ceratopsians (f’rinstance) — of which there were also fictional examples on Skull Island! — a rhino-alike with horns but no frill is both uninspired and unexciting. Also, hello, Iguanodon from the 1830s is calling.

But it gets worse. Although the skeletal diagram shows that this dumb thing was clearly an ornithischian, or at least had an ornithischian pelvis, the text says that it’s an aberrant sauropod. Er, wut? I guess some Camarasaurus finally got drunk enough to evolve into an ornithischian and then into a mammal-shaped ornithischian. Of course it would.

I should give some credit to Diablosaurus, though, because it forced me to think about why I hated it so much. That got me thinking about what actual sauropods did, evolutionarily (be large-bodied, long-necked and long-tailed, graviportal, non-oral-processing oviparous quadrupedal herbivores), and what they did not do (er, pretty much everything else, including being Diablosaurus-like).

And that led to my “Sauropod Heresies” mini-paper and talk for the Tate 2024 conference (link), which I tuned up with another year’s worth of thoughts for DinoCon 2025. The image above is a doodle I did for those talks, illustrating some of the paths not taken in sauropod evolution. If real sauropods were brontosaurs, I call the ‘forbidden’ experiments, including Diablosaurus, the nontosaurs.

To bring this full circle, Mark Witton has been kind enough to share some behind-the-scenes thinking for Dinosaurs Evolved, and he’s thought of some ways out of what we might call “brontosaur lock-in” that hadn’t occurred to me, but which I think are eminently plausible. One of them is the subject of a recent post on his Patreon. I’ll say no more for now, but let’s circle back after the book is out, to revisit both speculative sauropods and the real and imagined limits on the sauropod body plan.

Source: https://svpow.com/2026/10/02/speculative-sauropods/