When we picture dinosaurs, we usually picture the famous ones from the end of their reign: T. rex, Triceratops, the giant sauropods. But the dinosaur era lasted 165 million years, and the first dinosaurs lived nothing like those late stars. Plateosaurus was one of those early pioneers.
It lived around 215 million years ago in what’s now Europe - back in the Late Triassic, when dinosaurs were still a relatively new group of animals. About 26 feet long, it walked on two legs and stretched a long neck up to crop leaves from trees. It’s one of the earliest big plant-eating dinosaurs we know of.
Plateosaurus was so common in some areas that scientists have found whole herds of them buried together - suggesting they traveled in groups and sometimes got caught en masse in floods or mud traps.
