Giraffatitan
Skeletal reconstruction of Giraffatitan brancai at the Natural History Museum in Berlin after the reconstruction of 2007: The legs are under the body, the tail is lifted off the ground.
- Giraffatitan brancai ( Janensch, 1914)
Giraffatitan is a genus of sauropod dinosaur from the Upper Jurassic of Africa. With a total length of up to 26 meters, this dinosaur is one of the largest land animals of the earth's history.
With other genres Giraffatitan forms the taxon Brachiosauridae due to common anatomical features ( synapomorphies ) as the long front legs and the high-lying nostrils. Giraffatitan is the sister species of Brachiosaurus, to which it was originally provided by Werner Janensch. Janensch described two species, Brachiosaurus Brachiosaurus brancai and fraasi, but soon found that B. fraasi a junior synonym of B. brancai.
Gregory S. Paul pointed in 1988 to a number of differences between the North American type species of Brachiosaurus (B. altithorax ) and the African material out and presented as brancai in its own subgenus Giraffatitan. George Olshevsky considered these differences to be significant enough to raise Giraffatitan to a genus. A close examination of Michael Taylor showed that this distinction is justified because the differences between the two species are much larger than the well-known between other Sauropodengattungen such as Diplodocus and Barosaurus.
In the Berlin Museum of Natural History, a skeleton of Giraffatitan is issued, which was elected by the Paleontological Society for the Fossil of the Year 2012. It consists of skeletal material from several individuals, and also contains the material of the holotype ( HMN SII). The beistehende certificate from Guinness World Records on the record for the world's biggest dinosaur skeleton called him continue brancai as Brachiosaurus.