This tiny thigh bone is from one of the largest dinosaurs to ever walk the planet. At adult size, the same bone would be over 5 feet long, and would belong to an Apatosaurus as heavy as a whale! This baby dinosaur femur was discovered at the SMM’s Poison Creek Quarry in the 1980s, and has been legendary ever since – small long-necked dinosaurs are even more rare than large long-necked dinosaurs. If the skeleton of this little dinosaur was articulated you could imagine an animal about the size of a goat (with a much longer neck and tail).

My favorite dinosaurs are the sauropods, and this little bone captures two of the things that I most enjoy studying – long-necked dinosaurs, and how dinosaurs grow! In order to determine how fast a dinosaur grows, you have to have lots of different sizes of animals – what better specimen to serve as the “bottom end” of dinosaur size than a real sauropod baby.
– Kristi Curry Rogers, Curator of Paleontology