Wow. I knew the Shant was huge, I knew it was bigger than T-Rex, but when you see it next to a human you really get to see just how MASSIVE it really is.
That's true, although they surely didn't move using only their hind quarters regularly, since they were facultative bipeds. The title of biggest "bipedal" that we know of belongs to Tyrannosaurus.
I see them more as giant zebras/donkeys; they prefer to flee from a predator, but when there’s no other option, they’ll fight back by kicking, wrestling, and biting.
I hear a lot of people on forums complaining about how "The T.Rex is weaker now" and I couldn't disagree more. If anything the T.Rex has gotten more powerful than previously assumed. With higher weight estimates, good durability feats, and increased intelligence estimates. It's just that every other animal it lived with was just as amazing as it was. We use to depict any dinosaur that wasn't the T.Rex as mere fodder, even as something as large as a sauropod was often portrayed as a "gentle giant" We are now beginning to understand that the world of the dinosaurs was more competitive than we could imagine. But what could you expect from animals that share a family with birds. Who are known for their aggressive competition.
They don't share a familiy with birds, birds are a familiy inside them! which makes the Birds the last dinosaurs and the best ones considering they've survived any major extinction event since the triassic!
Fr every change and discovery we make on t rex just cements it as the perfect powerful predatory king of the dinosaurs (hell it even has a straight up keratin crown now)
Glad to see this group of dinosaurs getting the attention it deserves! Everyone loves the theropods, sauropods and ceratopsians but the ornithopods, pachycephalosaurs and thyreophorans are too often overlooked.
I saw a replica of Shantungosaurus at the Guangzhou Museum in China. The have it reared up on it's leg and you have to go to a higher floor to look at it's head. Even just the skeleton is massive.
As cool as this animal is, the part of the video which I can't stop focusing on is that it was described in 1973. I am trying to imagine what must it have been like for Xing and co trying to do paleontology in the middle of the Cultural Revolution.
Not really, it was smaller than a rex in the isle 😔 I mean at least it’s not like how they made camarasaurus half its actual size or austroraptor around 1/10 it’s size
Shantungosaurus size alone gives it almost 0 predators besides being injured, sick, old, or young. If it's very size intimidates predators imagine it's true strength and raw power. This thing is truly a beast.
It’s so frustrating that everyone continues making the assumption that being an herbivore means it’s also a “gentle giant”… some of the most aggressive and dangerous animals on earth are herbivores-see cape buffalo and hippopotamus. Eating plants =/= being docile!
@@Ealais76 Younger ones may have been more flighty, but there is safety in numbers. A whole herd running from a single predator doesn’t make much sense
@@averycheesypotato it does when you realize that a Rex is an ambush predator, if they run then the Rex has 0% chance of catching up, unlike modern mammals, most hadrosaurs greatly outsped their predators, which is how they survive. There’s a reason why they barely make it past their 1st year sometimes
@@Ealais76 The rex would prefer to go after the young, sick or injured only. By standing together a group can protect the vulnerable. We see examples of this in modern animals. Bison, buffalo, horses- they will form a ring around their young when a predator approaches. If they are spooked enough they will flee, but try to maintain those positions as they run
Thank you for adding both feet And meters, I know what the conversation is but it's still nice to hear them both together making it far easier to imagine. 😄👍
Honestly herbivores being this large makes sense. We know for a fact that predators like T.Rex were huge and with that massive size, they needed a lot of food. Given how they were built it is unlikely that they were hunting several small dinos instead of going for one big prey item.
One thing I’d like to hear more about is the effect mass has on dinosaurs as they enter old age. In our modern age predators rarely prey upon the healthy, instead going after the young, old, and sick. Listening to this video I wonder how this hadrosaurs body would have been changed by it’s girth as it approached old age and the physical degradation that is inherent to aging.
This dinosaur was big in all aspects, compared with brontosaurus makes me realize how much of their size was just neck and tail, while shantungosaurus and t-rex were all pure muscle and head.
If you compare body size shatungo looks very large, this also happens among sauropods, the largest specimens of Camarasaurus look larger than Diplodocus, because their heads and legs look more massive, despite the second being longer.
@@An-kw3ec I think its also worth noting that the side profile of the animal is deceptive. If you turned Shantungosaurus to face you head on you’d find that, despite being long and tall, hadrosaurs are remarkably narrow animals width-wise. A lot of the mass in Sauropods on the other hand is hidden in the fact that they are comparably quite wide animals.
Hadrosaurs always fascinate me, as I find them to be so unique and interesting-looking. My favorite hadrosaurids were the Lambeosaurs. Side note: I've never neen a fan of the idea that theropods hunted in packs. There's scant evidence of this in both reptiles and birds. Though some cooperative hunting happens in a very small group of raptorial birds, it is the exception, and not the rule. Furthermore, the running hypothesis on why animals hunt in groups has to do with the area they live in, as we find that almost all pack-hunting animals on Earth right now developed & live in the Afrotropical realm, and this is due to environmental factors that create a disparaging gap in food availability. Animals have to hunt in packs in order to secure food they wouldn't be able to find by themselves.
@@NextToToddliness given that non avian dinosaurs did exist for 150 million years I say it's likely some theropods hunted in groups but this would be the rare exception, not the norm as is commonly depicted. though mobbing behavior similar to komodo dragons and crocodilians seems more common.
idk how anyone can come to that conclusion ,even a 6m hadrosaur would be strong as an ox at least ...just look at the femur bones and its skeletal structure as a whole...
the “gentle giant” phrase is not that accurate, herbivores of a large size usually have a bad temper, and will aggressively deal with predators, take hippos for example.
the movies make them look weak and they never fight back...also the documentaries are even worse making them the size of an large bull or an ox when some were bigger than an elephant...
It's just so silly to assume an animal without obvious weapons would be defenseless. Like horses rely mostly on speed, but still can put out hell of a fight. No horns, claws or spiked tail... Even your average size hadrosaur would be dangerous by its power and bulk alone.
Given that T-Rex lived on another continent and the asian Tyrannosaurs didn't really stack up in size, quite possibly this was a Hadrosaur without natural predators.
Atleast in adulthood, young individuals may have been targeted, similar to modern bison calves being taken by coyotes, wolves, cougars and bears when they are left unattended
tarbosaurus did reach large sizes and is known to have been to 12m in the largest specimens usually based on the largest skulls and a few larger skulls from private collections....still it was slimmer than t rex but the skulls were more robust and larger than any other tyrannosaur except for t rex..
@@jackstraw4222 that would be the largest possible sizes. I dunno about the 12m figure, but it could check out given that the largest skulls are almost the same length as Sue's, of course a T-Rex known to be 12.4 meters in length. Your average Tarbosaur would still be around 10 meters and 5 tons, significantly smaller than the average size for Tyrannosaurus Rex. The biggest T-Rex skulls for reference would scale to an adult about 13.6 meters long, so there are always outliers.
@@bagheerakiplingi2037 Underrated* they’re perpetually depicted as helpless predator fodder. As if everyone forgets that these were elephant sized animals or larger.
@@bagheerakiplingi2037 but I mean literally nobody overrates them. They are the stars of no movies. They’re no child's favourite dinosaur. They die without a fight in almost every dinosaur documentary and videogame, often to predators who would have no chance of killing one. They are perpetually underrated.
i heard that there's a possibilty of E. Annecten could outsize Shant by abit. but i'm not sure about that. the largest specimen of E.Annectens we know is X-rex.
3:25 OK I wouldn’t go that far of a hadrosaur, biting the neck out of a poor tyrannosaur. In my opinion I would probably just use its sheer size and stomp the crap out of the tyrannosaur, or use its massive tail, or it would kick in on a fly kick like a zebra, but it would kick like we see in the video game path of titans if you get the edmontosaurus mod
It’s crazy how fucking insane the herbivores were in the Cretaceous period. Just goes to show that Tyrannosaurus Rex must have been an absolute freak of nature to hunt these things.😂😂😂😂
A Hadrosaur fossil proved for me once and for all that T. rex was a hunter: a partially-healed, Tyrannosaur- tooth-shaped hole in an Edmontosaurus' caudal vertebra.
This video I absolutely get, the carnivores were smaller than the the adult prey they had.......so this is normal. Almost no predator goes after larger healthy prey adults. It still doesn't explain north american tyrannosaurs ..........because that is a complete what-the-fuck to all predator/prey metrics I can think of.
As a geology major going towards paleontology, I knew hadrosaurs got big, but that being said, this just took me 100% and more by surprise 😱🤯 man do I love paleontology we get to learn and know cool stuff like this 🙌🙌🙌
Predators always prefer making smaller, less dangerous creatures their prey. There is no sense for a predator to tackle a creature that might injure them severely. So evolution tends to produce larger herbivores who live in an environment with dangerous predators. Those predators look for smaller prey and this allows the bigger ones to survive. Over time this causes herbivores to get larger. It's not quite this simple but the basic principle seems to be a reasonable hypothesis.
On the flipside, predators can grow larger due to the existence of larger prey that can sustain them. Although a very large herbivore would be risky for a predator if fighting fit or protected in a herd, a lone one that is very young, very old, sick, or injured could have enough meat to sustain a predator for weeks and be relatively easy to take down. Prey animals have various tactics to make sure only the fittest of the herd survive. Those too weak to keep up with the herd or young with any detectible defects are sacrificed to predators so that the herd may get reprieve from getting stalked. On the other side, predators become ever stronger or develop sophisticated tactics to take advantage of any individual with weakness. Solitary predators favor sheer size and strength. Pack hunters favor speed, stamina, skill, and society to take out prey much larger and stronger than themselves. Death by a thousand cuts.
@@MunkyDrag0n A very strange fictionalization of actual evolutionary forces. Rarely do predatory animals grow beyond a certain point to take larger prey, as animals that are within reason to hunt at smaller sizes solitarily will always be more energetically efficient. Even in our modern world, bears are huge not for being able to take larger prey, they generally take smaller prey than other, less massive solitary predators would, such as cougars and jaguars. Usually, predatory animals attain larger sizes in order to hunt less often, and to create a buffer between themselves and starvation if times of low abundance occur. Factors like this show just how many factors are in play, and size for size's sake is usually a losing strategy.
@@MunkyDrag0n I have a good friend who decided to learn evolutionary biology after she retired. She taught sociology at California State University, Fullerton for 32 years. She loves Scholarly discussions like this.
Hadrosaurs are my favorite group of dinosaurs going back to childhood, so awesome video! 👏 On your final note, I think it's important to acknowledge that even though Shantungosaurus didn't quite make it to the K-PG boundary, hadrosaurs continued to truly thrive in that area of modern day China/Russia. At least three lambeosaurines (Olorotitan, Charonosaurus, Amurosaurus) and two saurolophines (Kerberosaurus and Wulagasaurus) were living there near the extinction event. Quite the contrast to North America where Edmontosaurus seems to be the sole dominant hadrosaur we know of...whatever caused Shantungosaurus' extinction, it doesn't seem to have effected other hadrosaurs' success in that area of the world at least. I'd be fascinated to know what factors caused such a drastic difference in species diversity.
Tyrannosaurus had to get big somehow, and it wasn't be regularly slaughtering tiny animals. Only something so large could serve as a on-the-go larder for such massive predators. They really owe their success to having the food be so big, and being strong enough to kill the food.
@@BeegRanhoDefinitely! No pushovers themselves, it ensures natural selection so only the strongest and most successful predators continue to thrive. The weak ones get stomped
Thumbnail: 16 TONs My Brain: (in subterranean voice) and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt In all seriousness and more on topic tho, it's always nice to see content that shows that herbivores just arent walking slabs of meat waiting to be eaten by carnivores. Many of them were strong af and incredibly dangerous for even the biggest of carnivores to hunt.
The truth is, we don't really know how big Zhuchengtyrannus could get since it's only known from very fragmentary material. Most estimates place it as slightly smaller than Tarbosaurus, but based on the massive size of the herbivores in the Xingezhuang Formation like Shantungosaurus & Sinoceratops I wouldn't be surprised if it was pushing Tyrannosaurus-size...
It's also a commonly mistaken idea that larger predators take larger prey. Brown Bears in North America are some of the largest terrestrial predators on earth, and in times where other nutritional sources are depleted, they will take caribou with surprising effectiveness. This is opposed to wolves and cougars, who regularly clock in at less than a fifth of the weight of the smallest brown bears. Both wolves *and* cougars obligatorily rely on prey populations of animals that can handily weigh over ten times their own weight, such as elk and moose. It's also possible it's like a bison or elephant scenario, where the adults are immune to any form of predation, but often fall to the elements, or their young may be vulnerable enough to be regularly taken by predators in their environment. Tyrannosaurus rex is very similar to a tiger in ways, where it likely primarily hunted animals of similar weight, while avoiding giants like triceratops or anatosaurus out of self preservation.
@@juiceart9199 Brown/Grizzly Bears are omnivores so they're not really the best comparison. You have to remember the North American ecosystem is a shadow of its former self before the megafaunal collapse, if it was Bison would be filling a similar niche to modern Cape Buffalo on the African Plains. Hyenas & Wild Dogs can bring down Buffalo but almost NEVER healthy adults. Bison's primary predators were probably Saber cats & large Pantherine cats that have since died out.
@@juiceart9199 bison aren't exactly immune to predation, and we know T. rex did hunt full grown triceratops and edmontosaurus based on healed bite wounds from both genera.
@@Dinoquaoar-ts6lj Actually there has been either a reexamination or additional finds of Sinoceratops that have size buffed it to 7.8 meters & 5.7 tons, which would make it the largest Centrosaurine Ceratopsian yet known & would make it almost Triceratops-sized.
Rex fans when the dinosaur theyre tryna prove against is heavier: well size and speed doesn’t matter ANYWAYS, the rex is smart so it can do a backflip and jump onto the shantungasaurus since it’s lighter!!!
I remamber soing this thing as a kid in dinosaur king for the first time and was just blown away by how huge it was. I remains as one of my favorite dinosaurs. I was also realy happy when I turned on Isle and it was there to play. All other hadrosaurs were always just prey in like everything I ever watched as a kid, but this thing. Man even like 8 year old me knew that this bigass mf is no snack for the first rex that shows its ugly head.
Yeah in the old dinosaur shows t rex is always destroying the hadrosaurs but in reality they'd be more of a challenge and even t rex would be apprehensive about attacking a large group of them
My theory on the (Edmontosaurus alternative), is that they evolved to be larger because predators kept exclusively hunting the smaller of their species of time, resulting in only the largest and healthiest to typically survive to pass on their genes to the next generation, whereas the runts or smallest kept getting picked off.
If it wasn't for saurapods the largest land animals ever would be the giant straight tusked elephants! And the modern african elephant wouldn't be too far behind, since some individuals can get well over 10 tonnes.
The worst hadrosaurus slander i have seen was from Dungeons and dragons 5e monster manual. Normaly they would have a singel entry for a dinosaurs(example just T-rex"), but they just slaped all of hadrosaurus as just hadrosaurus. Hadrosaurus stats are also realy weak compared to the other dinosaurs. The stats are more comparable to that of a cow. And even then am more afraid of the cow because it can do more damage in a singel round.
Why don’t you get to think and make a suggestion creating another RU-vid Videos Shows that’s all about the Extinct Prehistoric Amphicyons (Bear Dogs) on the next Extinct Zoo coming up next?!⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️👍👍👍👍👍
Similar to today, apex predators are still several if not many times smaller than their herbivorous counterparts. this is how animals like giraffes and elephants escape becoming prey to prides of lions. What they lack in specialized fighting prowess they make up for with sheer size and force. I'm glad you took the time to rectify the pop culture understanding of the duck bills, as one such representation from my childhood i think just called dinosaurs would have had you believe that Carnotaurus was an absolute unit capable of killing the largest hadrosaurs with relative ease, ragdolling smaller specimens like a mink kills rats
While this is generally true, its important to note this isnt always the case. For instance the largest animal in the Everglades is the American crocodile. For another example, the largest animal in the Amazon is the black caiman. All this is to say, their are always exceptions to every rule.