From lizards last week to the big lizards this week. These are the peacable kind, well, as peacable as you can expect from a gigantic lizard.

I spent a little bit of time looking but I couldn’t turn up the source image on any of the normal sites (or any of the new ones that I found to sift through either). It’s probably not original though, it looks like a drawing of some kind or a painting. It might be one from a museum like the one at Dinosaur National Monument where they have found some other bones as well.

This particular type of giant lizard is called an Apatosaurus now, although I learned it as Brontosaurus when I was growing up. They lived in the Late Jurassic period, making the ~7000BC way off the mark of course by about 140 million years. Lots of these are in big museums, or replicas, with their heads craning upwards kind of like a giraffe, but recently people have been saying that they would never be in that position, because it would be impossible for the circulatory system to pump the blood to the head when it was up - they would put it at the max horizontal from the center.

I remember seeing a lot of these on the side of the road in the past, next to Sinclair stations where you could get gas. I always thought that it was a cruel tip to the ultimate source of the oil that you were buying. They are legitimate roadside attractions and I’m pretty sure that I’ve had my picture taken to them some time before.