Plateosaurus
Franconian Lindworm (Plateosaurier)
Plateosaurus engelhardti
Feuerletten, Late Triassic: Norian, approx. 225 Mio. years old
Ellingen, Middle Franconia, Bavaria, Germany
During the Triassic period (about 252 to 201 million years ago), an important group of reptiles evolved very rapidly, the so-called archosaurs (“ruling reptiles”). Early on, they split into two major evolutionary lineages, one of which includes the dinosaurs, including their modern-day descendants, the birds. Dinosaurs first appear in the fossil record in the Triassic and evolved into the dominant group of terrestrial vertebrates in the Mesozoic. Plateosaurus and its closer relatives were among the first successful dinosaurs to achieve worldwide distribution as early as the Triassic.
They were the first large herbivores among the dinosaurs. Mass assemblages of Plateosaurus have been found in Central Europe, such as in Ellingen, Franconia, where the skeleton exhibited here comes from. This suggests that these early dinosaurs lived socially. Although animals such as Plateosaurus were already among the largest animals of their time, their descendants, the sauropods, reached gigantic proportions in the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods – with animals up to 40 m long and weighing over 70 t, they were the largest animals ever to have lived on land.
SNSB-BSPG 1962 I 153
Skeletal reconstruction