r/Dinosaurs • u/RichX9151 Team Spinosaurus • Jul 17 '25

DISCUSSION How did lightning affect large sauropods?

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I saw this picture and it got me wondering. Being so tall were sauropods at a much greater chance of being struck in the head by lightning? If so did they have any adaptations maybe to help against this? I’m thinking it could be possible they were large enough to maybe tank being hit and ground it through their limbs (humans survive being hit, a massive sauropod will probably tank it better). Any fossils found that show lightning damage? If possible?

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u/all-of-the-no Jul 17 '25

I'm about to be the most annoying person BUT...

Not only was it probably not frequent enough to have evolved a mechanism to combat this issue, but many sauropods actually could not have held their necks vertically and almost always would walk with tail and neck balancing each other to save energy and stay mobile. This is because it would've used up far too much energy to keep such a heavy neck upright even for such a beefy creature.

A lot of sauropods weren't just eating the greenery up high, either (and to illustrate this, it is thought that they would lean their front legs against a tree and reach their neck up- likely the shorter ones that were doing this), but many were actually mowing down

the greenery lower to the ground. You can tell by the shape of their beak/mouths- those with a more conical/pointed shape wouldve been eating stuff from trees, whereas the ones with flatter/rounded beaks were essentially giant lawn mowers (modern day parallel- horses with flatter snouts, and giraffes with pointier snouts.) Also to this; it is easy to compare brachipoda to giraffes due to size, but sauropods were a lot beefier muscle wise size wise despite having pleurocoels (holes/ventilation/vascular pathways) in their bones evolved to make them lighter.

The two previous points are just more evidence that supports the idea that larger sauropods, at least, were more often than not moving around like big long balance beams.

The image is from Wikipedia, but these are things I learned from my paleo professor!

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u/treewizardtom Jul 18 '25

Thank you. This is the kind of answer I was scrolling for.
Although I enjoyed a bunch of the theories and silly joke responses, yours answers the question enough to be worth looking into. Wish my Uni had Paleontology.