Kaatedocus Pronunciation

Fun Facts

• ✓Kaatedocus fossils traveled from Wyoming all the way to Switzerland, where scientists at the Sauriermuseum Aathal studied and formally described them in 2012, making this a rare case of a North American dinosaur introduced to science inside a European museum.
• ✓The skull of Kaatedocus preserves fragile bones around the eye socket that almost never survive fossilization in sauropods, giving researchers an unprecedented close-up view of exactly what a diplodocid face really looked like.
• ✓Kaatedocus is named using a word from the Crow language (Apsáalooke), spoken by Indigenous people whose ancestors lived in Montana and Wyoming for thousands of years, making it one of very few dinosaurs to carry a Native American word in its scientific name.
• ✓The two scientists who officially named Kaatedocus in 2012, Emanuel Tschopp and Octávio Mateus, were also lead authors on the landmark 2015 study that restored Brontosaurus as a valid genus after more than a century of being lumped in with Apatosaurus.
• ✓When Kaatedocus was alive 149 million years ago, the Morrison Formation ecosystem hosted at least 10 different sauropod species living side by side, a diversity of giant plant-eaters that has never been matched in any ecosystem before or since in Earth's entire history.