Paris:
A fondly held belief about long-necked sauropods, the giant four-footed dinosaurs beloved of monster movies and children, is most probably untrue, a dino expert said on Wednesday.
At the zenith of the dinosaurs' reign, some sauropods evolved necks of extraordinary length -- more than nine metres in the case of the Mamenchisaurus, a titan of the Late Jurassic period around 150 million years ago.
Prevailing wisdom has it that these leviathans used their necks like giraffes today. They reached up high into the trees, munching leisurely on forest canopy that was out of reach for rival herbivores.
Not so, says a paper appearing in <i>Biology Letters</i>, a journal published by Britain's prestigious Royal Society.
The research argues that giant sauropods most probably preferred to feed horizontally, rather than vertically, on the grounds of energy cost.
Australian evolutionary biologist Roger Seymour did a simulation of how much blood pressure a gigantic sauropod would need in order to place its head vertically.
He then calculated how much energy the creature would require in order to pump around blood at this high pressure.
"It would have required the animal to expend approximately half of its energy intake just to circulate the blood," maintained Seymour.
"A vertical neck would have required a high systemic arterial blood pressure. It is therefore energetically more feasible to have used a more or less horizontal neck to enable wide browsing while keeping blood pressure low," added Seymour.