elephants, provided it's ok to include stem-elephants.
pan-elephants eat at a wide range of levels, like a sauropod, they do it by using a light and highly mobile appendage - the neck for sauropods, the trunk for pan-elephants
pan-elephants were highly diverse and lived in a wide range of environments, across many tens of millions of years, like sauropods
pan-elephants were persistently among the largest, or, more often, actually the largest land animals of their era, like sauropods.
beavers are surely fascinating and wonderful animals, and they're impressive in their ability to tear down trees for food and shelter, but they're not especially big, and they don't feed on as wide a variety of plants.
@gay_ornithischians
I'd put them ahead of beavers, because it seems to me they consume a much wider variety of vegetation, in a wider variety of environments, and they've been at it longer (so far), but because they're so small they fall behind pan-elephants.
@gay_ornithischians I like giraffes in their own right, but as sauropod-mimics, they're below beavers; they have huge, heavy heads and totally fail on acquiring food with a light, mobile appendage. They don't live in a wide range of environments. (Fossil giraffes expand that quite a bit, but it still ends up less than beavers and far less than elephants.) Sauropods were probably good at getting to off shore islands, and that's something elephants also do well, but giraffes totally fail.
@apophis@llewelly i think someone speculated about a "mothership sauropod" over at the sv-pow comment section. iirc the juvenile sauropods would go and eat. once they came back to the heard the "barely mobile" superadults would feed on their droppings
@gay_ornithischians@apophis
oh, wow, there really was such a thread, only 2 years ago, but, hilariously, I argued against the idea, although most of my objections had to do with things other than eusociality.
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