page_title: Amargasaurus
section_title: Senses and posture
hierarchical_section_title: Amargasaurus / Paleobiology / Senses and posture
caption_attribution_description: English: Reconstructed Amargasaurus skull.
context_page_description: Amargasaurus is a genus of sauropod dinosaur from the Early Cretaceous epoch of what is now Argentina. The only known skeleton was discovered in 1984 and is virtually complete, including a fragmentary skull, making Amargasaurus one of the best-known sauropods of its epoch. Amargasaurus was first described in 1991 and contains a single known species, Amargasaurus cazaui. It was a large animal, but small for a sauropod, reaching 9 to 10 meters in length. Most distinctively, it sported two parallel rows of tall spines down its neck and back, taller than in any other known sauropod. In life, these spines most likely could have stuck out of the body as solitary structures that supported a keratinous sheath. An alternate hypothesis, now less favored, postulates that they could have formed a scaffold supporting a skin sail. They might have been used for display, combat, or defense.
  Amargasaurus was discovered in sedimentary rocks of the La Amarga Formation, which dates back to the Barremian and late Aptian stages of the Early Cretaceous.
context_section_description: Paulina Carabajal and colleagues, in 2014, CT-scanned the skull, allowing for the generation of three-dimensional models of both the cranial endocast (the cast of the brain cavity) and the inner ear. Using these models, the cranial endocast was shown to encompass 94 to 98 milliliters (0.20 to 0.21 U.S. pints) in volume. The inner ear was 30 millimeters (1.2 inches) tall and 22 mm (0.87 inches) wide. The lagena, the part containing the hair cells for hearing, was rather short, indicating that the sense of hearing would have been poorer in Amargasaurus than in other sauropods for which inner ears have been studied.
  The first skeletal reconstructions show the skull in a near-horizontal posture. Salgado, in 1999, argued that such a posture would have been anatomically impossible due to the elongated neural spines of the neck vertebrae. Instead, he envisaged the head in a nearly vertical orientation. The habitual orientation of the head is usually reflected by the orientation of the semicircular canals of the inner ear, which housed the sense of balance (vestibular system). Using their three-dimensional model of the inner ear, Carabajal and colleagues suggested that the snout faced downwards at an angle of roughly 65° relative to the horizontal. A similar value has recently been proposed for the related Diplodocus. The neutral posture of the neck can be approximated based on how the cervical vertebrae attached to each other. According to Carabajal and colleagues, the neck was gently sloping downwards, so that the snout would have rested 80 cm (2.6 ft) above the ground in neutral posture. In reality, neck posture would have varied according to the respective activities of the animals. Raising of the neck, e.g. for reaching an alert position, would have been constricted by the elongated neural spines, not permitting heights greater than 270 cm (8.9 ft).
caption: Reconstructed skull
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