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Seeing a Brachiosaurus in real life was one of the most moving moments of my life.
On why I love giant dinosaurs (and giraffes), and how they reflect on the state of the world today.
I few years ago I saw a dinosaur and I cried. I was really excited to go and see what is one of my favourite species of dinosaur for the first time in real life, the Brachiosaurus in Berlin’s Museum für Naturkunde (Natural History Museum), which is the tallest dinosaur mount in the world!
More accurately it’s actually a Giraffatitan, a different genus in the Brachiosauridae family, although it was only reclassified as a different species as recently as 2009. Because that species is actually taller, it’s fair to say that while I think of myself as a Brachiosaurus lover, my heart belongs to Giraffatitan. Either way, they’re related species and both amazing!
For a long time, Brachiosaurus (specifically what we now know as Giraffatitan) was thought to be the largest of all dinosaurs. Several even bigger dinosaurs have been discovered in the last few decades, but that hardly diminishes from the glory of this enormous creature.
I’m the kind of person that isn’t wedded to seeing things in real life, I’m mostly quite content to know many amazing things exist and see wonderful photos of them—I know the demands of billions of humans means…
