Plateosaurus is a large prosauropod dating back to late Triassic Europe. One of the bigger members of the prosauropod group, this dinosaur measured roughly twenty-eight feet in length, it was also the biggest dinosaur from the Triassic period. It shared it's environment with non-dinosaurian reptiles like pyhytosaurs, giant amphibian stegocephalians, first pterosaurs and primative theropod such as Liliensternus and Halticosaurus among others. Plateosaurus was one of the last prosauropod dinosaurs that walked on its hind legs alone. Like other prosauropods, it fed on plants, though it might've eaten small animals occassionally. It was falsely or mysteriously depicted as living in North America alongside Coelophysis, appearing right at the end and scaring away a flock the Triassic theropods, in the BBC special "Walking with Dinosaurs", not an impractical theory due to the connection of the continents at the time, but still incorrect. To make this correct, it would've instead been truly depicted as living in Europe alongside its natural enemy Liliensternus, with this being both dinos' own segment had Liliensternus not appeared exclusively in Walking With Dinosaurs - The Arena Spectacular. In 1834, physician Johann Friedrich Engelhardt discovered some vertebrae and leg bones at Heroldsberg near Nuremberg, Germany. Three years later German palaeontologist Hermann von Meyer designated them as the type specimen of a new genus, Plateosaurus. Since then, remains of well over 100 individuals of Plateosaurus have been discovered at various locations throughout Europe. Material assigned to Plateosaurus has been found at over 50 localities in Germany (mainly along the Neckar and Pegnitz river valleys), Switzerland (Frick) and France. Three localities are of special importance, because they yielded specimens in large numbers and of unusually good quality: near Halberstadt in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany; Trossingen in Baden-Württemberg, Germany; and Frick. Between the 1910s and 1930s, excavations in a clay pit in Saxony-Anhalt revealed between 39 and 50 skeletons that belonged to Plateosaurus, along with teeth and a small number of bones of the theropod Liliensternus, and two skeletons and some fragments of the turtle Proganochelys. Some of the plateosaur material was assigned to P. longiceps, a species described by palaeontologist Otto Jaekel in 1914. Most of the material found its way to the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin, where much of it was destroyed during World War II. The Halberstadt quarry today is covered by a housing development. P. engelhardti, collection number F 33 of the Staatliches Museum für Naturkunde Stuttgart, Germany, in dorsal view. The skeleton was kept in articulation as found at Trossingen by Seemann in 1933. It has the typical folded hind limbs of most Plateosaurus finds. Unusually, the anterior body is not twisted to one side. The second major German locality with Plateosaurus finds, a quarry in Trossingen in the Black Forest, was worked repeatedly in the 20th century. Between 1911 and 1932, excavations during six field seasons led by German palaeontologists Eberhard Fraas (1911–1912), Friedrich von Huene (1921–23), and finally Reinhold Seemann (1932) revealed a total of 35 complete or partially complete skeletons of Plateosaurus, as well as fragmentary remains of approximately 70 more individuals. The large number of specimens from Swabia had already caused German palaeontologist Friedrich August von Quenstedt to nickname the animal Schwäbischer Lindwurm (Swabian lindworm or Swabian dragon). Much of the Trossingen material was destroyed in 1944, when the Naturaliensammlung in Stuttgart (predecessor to the State Museum of Natural History Stuttgart (SMNS)) burnt to the ground after an Allied bombing raid. Luckily, however, a 2011 study by SMNS curator Rainer Schoch found that, at least from the finds of Seemann's 1932 excavation, "the scientifically most valuable material is still available". The Plateosaurus skeletons in a clay pit of the Tonwerke Keller AG in Frick, Switzerland, were first noticed in 1976. While the bones are often significantly deformed by taphonomic processes, Frick yields skeletons of P. trossingensis comparable in completeness and position to those of Trossingen. In 1997, workers of an oil platform of the Snorre oil field, located at the northern end of the North Sea within the Lunde Formation, were drilling through sandstone for oil exploration when they stumbled on a fossil they believed to be plant material. The drill core containing the fossil was extracted from 2,256 m (7,402 ft) below the seafloor. Martin Sander and Nicole Klein, palaeontologists of the University of Bonn, analysed the bone microstructure and concluded that the rock preserved fibrous bone tissue from a fragment of a limb bone belonging to Plateosaurus, making it the first dinosaur found in Norway. Plateosaurus material has also been found in the Fleming Fjord Formation of East Greenland. The type series of Plateosaurus engelhardti included "roughly 45 bone fragments", of which nearly half are lost. The remaining material is kept in the Institute for Palaeontology of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany. From these bones, German palaeontologist Markus Moser in 2003 sele Plateosaurus had the typical body shape of a herbivorous bipedal dinosaur: a small skull, a long and flexible neck composed of 10 cervical vertebrae, a stocky body, and a long, mobile tail composed of at least 40 caudal vertebrae. The arms of Plateosaurus were very short, even compared to most other "prosauropods". However, they were strongly built, with hands adapted for powerful grasping. The shoulder girdle was narrow (often misaligned in skeletal mounts and drawings), with the clavicles (collar bones) touching at the body's midline, as in other basal sauropodomorphs. The hind limbs were held under the body, with slightly flexed knees and ankles, and the foot was digitigrade, meaning the animal walked on its toes. The proportionally long lower leg and metatarsus show that Plateosaurus could run quickly on its hind limbs. The tail of Plateosaurus was typically dinosaurian, muscular and with high mobility. The skull of Plateosaurus is small and narrow, rectangular in side view, and nearly three times as long as it is high. There is an almost rectangular lateral temporal foramen at the back. The large, round orbit (eye socket), the sub-triangular antorbital fenestra and the oval naris (nostril) are of almost equal size. The jaws carried many small, leaf-shaped, socketed teeth: 5 to 6 per premaxilla, 24 to 30 per maxilla, and 21 to 28 per dentary (lower jaw). The thick, leaf-shaped, bluntly serrated tooth crowns were suitable for crushing plant material. The low position of the jaw joint gave the chewing muscles great leverage, so that Plateosaurus could deliver a powerful bite. These features suggest that it fed primarily to exclusively on plants. Its eyes were directed to the sides, rather than the front, providing all-round vision to watch for predators. Some fossil skeletons have preserved sclerotic rings (rings of bone plates that protect the eye). The ribs were connected to the dorsal (trunk) vertebrae with two joints, acting together as a simple hinge joint, which has allowed researchers to reconstruct the inhaled and exhaled positions of the ribcage. The difference in volume between these two positions defines the air exchange volume (the amount of air moved with each breath), determined to be approximately 20 L for a P. engelhardti individual estimated to have weighed 690 kg, or 29 mL/kg bodyweight. This is a typical value for birds, but not for mammals, and indicates that Plateosaurus probably had an avian-style flow-through lung, although indicators for postcranial pneumaticity (air sacs of the lung invading the bones to reduce weight) can be found on the bones of only a few individuals, and were only recognised in 2010. Combined with evidence from bone histology this indicates that Plateosaurus was endothermic. The type species of Plateosaurus is P. trossingensis. Adults of this species reached 4.8 to 10 metres (16 to 33 ft) in length, and ranged in mass from 600 to 4,000 kilograms (1,300 to 8,800 lb). The geologically older species, P. gracilis (formerly named Sellosaurus gracilis), was somewhat smaller, with a total length of 4 to 5 metres (13 to 16 ft).cted a partial sacrum (series of fused hip vertebrae) as a lectotype. The type locality is not known for certain, but Moser attempted to infer it from previous publications and the colour and preservation of the bones. He concluded that the material probably stems from the "Buchenbühl", roughly two kilometres (1.2 mi) south of Heroldsberg.
