Plateosaurus (probably meaning "broad lizard"), a genus of plateosaurid dinosaur, lived around 214 to 204 million years ago during the Late Triassic period in what is now Central and Northern Europe. It was an early sauropodomorph dinosaur, a so-called "prosauropod". It is now among the dinosaurs best known to science: over 100 skeletons have been found, some of them nearly complete. The abundance of its fossils in Swabia, Germany, has led to the nickname Schwäbischer Lindwurm (Swabian lindworm). Plateosaurus was a bipedal herbivore with a small skull on a long, mobile neck, sharp but plump plant-crushing teeth, powerful hind limbs, short but muscular arms and grasping hands with large claws on three fingers, possibly used for defence and feeding. Plateosaurus showed strong developmental plasticity: instead of having a fairly uniform adult size, fully grown individuals were between 4.8 and 10 metres (16 and 33 ft) long and weighed between 600 and 4,000 kilograms (1,300 and 8,800 lb). The animals lived for at least 12 to 20 years, but the maximum life span is not known. (Full article...)
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