Question 1

How do you say Sonidosaurus?

Accepted Answer

Sonidosaurus is pronounced soh-NID-oh-SORE-us. Break it into four parts: soh, then NID, then oh, then SORE-us. The stress falls on the NID syllable and again on SORE. A good memory trick is to think of it as so-NEEDED-a-SAURUS, which sounds silly but keeps the stresses in the right places. Once you get it, it rolls off the tongue pretty easily.

Question 2

What does Sonidosaurus mean?

Accepted Answer

Sonidosaurus means Sonid lizard. The Sonid part of the name refers to the Sonid region of Inner Mongolia in northern China, and to the Sonid people who live there. The saurus part comes from the Ancient Greek word sauros, which means lizard, and is used in the names of hundreds of dinosaurs. The species name saihangaobiensis adds even more detail, meaning from Saihangaobi, the exact quarry site where the fossils were found. So the full name essentially says this is a lizard from Saihangaobi in the Sonid lands.

Question 3

How big was Sonidosaurus?

Accepted Answer

Sonidosaurus was about 9 meters long, which is roughly 30 feet, making it approximately the length of a school bus. For a titanosaur, that is actually on the small side. Its relatives include some of the largest animals ever to walk the Earth, with giants like Argentinosaurus potentially reaching 30 to 40 meters. Scientists have not confirmed an exact body weight for Sonidosaurus, but based on comparisons with similar-sized sauropods, it likely weighed several tons.

Question 4

What did Sonidosaurus eat?

Accepted Answer

Sonidosaurus was a herbivore, meaning it only ate plants. Like all sauropods, it used its long neck to reach vegetation that smaller animals could not access. In the Late Cretaceous landscape of Inner Mongolia, the available plants would have included ferns, cycads, and conifers. Grasses as we know them today had not yet spread widely, so Sonidosaurus was browsing a very different menu than modern large herbivores like elephants or giraffes.

Question 5

Where did Sonidosaurus live?

Accepted Answer

Sonidosaurus lived in what is now the Inner Mongolia region of northern China, near the edge of the Gobi Desert. Its fossils were found in the Iren Dabasu Formation, also called the Erlian Formation, which preserves sediments from floodplains and seasonal river environments from around 72 million years ago. The landscape back then would have been very different from the dry steppe of today, with rivers, patches of forest, and a much warmer climate.

Question 6

Was Sonidosaurus found near any other famous dinosaurs?

Accepted Answer

Yes, and this is one of the coolest things about it. The exact quarry at Saihangaobi where Sonidosaurus was first found in 2001 later produced the bones of Gigantoraptor erlianensis, described in 2007. Gigantoraptor is considered the largest known feathered dinosaur, estimated at around 8 meters long and 1,400 kilograms. So the same patch of Inner Mongolian ground gave scientists two completely different and scientifically important new dinosaurs within just a few years.

Question 7

Who discovered Sonidosaurus?

Accepted Answer

The fossils were first excavated in 2001 from a quarry near Saihangaobi in Inner Mongolia. The formal scientific description was published in 2006 by a team of five researchers: Xu Xing, Zhang Xinlei, Tan Lin, Zhao Xijin, and a second Tan. Xu Xing is particularly famous in the world of paleontology and has described more dinosaurs than almost any other living scientist, with dozens of feathered dinosaur species to his name. His work in China helped transform our understanding of how birds evolved from dinosaurs.

Question 8

Is Sonidosaurus related to T. rex?

Accepted Answer

Not closely at all. Sonidosaurus was a titanosaur, which is a type of sauropod, the group of long-necked, four-legged, plant-eating giants. T. rex was a theropod, a two-legged predator. Both are dinosaurs, so they share a common ancestor, but they are about as different from each other as a whale is from a tiger. Sonidosaurus and T. rex were alive around the same time in the Late Cretaceous, but they belonged to completely different branches of the dinosaur family tree.

Sonidosaurus Pronunciation

Sonidosaurus Picture

What does Sonidosaurus mean?

Name Roots

Fun Facts

Learn More About Sonidosaurus

Related Dinosaurs