China's longest-necked dinosaur - Mamenchisaurus
Mamenchisaurus is one of the lizard-footed dinosaurs, with a body length of more than 20 meters, or even 30 meters. It is famous for its very long neck, which accounts for almost half of its entire body length. Not only is each cervical vertebra that makes up the neck long, but it also has as many as 19 cervical vertebrae, which is the most numerous among the lizard-footed species.
It is known that Mamensaurus lived in China about 160 million years ago, in the late Jurassic period. 1987, the fossil of Mamensaurus was first discovered in China, but it was an incomplete skeleton, so it was difficult for scientists to determine the overall size of this dinosaur.
In 2012, scientists discovered a fossil of a dinosaur close to Mamenchisaurus in Xinjiang, called Shanshan Xinjiang Megalosaurus, which had a complete neck. Researchers used a technique called computed tomography and compared the Mamenchisaurus with the Xinjiang Megalosaurus, eventually calculating the length of the Mamenchisaurus' neck, which was 15 meters long.
Back in 2021, scientists had discovered the first concentrated burial site of the very biodiverse, late-Jurassic Mamenchisaurus fauna in China to date in Guangyuan, Sichuan.