Main Page

Welcome to the explain xkcd wiki!

We have an explanation for all 6 xkcd comics, and only 0 (0%) are incomplete. Help us finish them!

Latest comic

Go to this comic explanation

Sauropods

|< < Prev #3185 (December 24, 2025)

Title text: Vertebrae Georg

|< < Prev Random Explanation

Explanation

This comic attempts to correct people on the skeletal structure of sauropod dinosaurs, claiming that most individuals actually had short necks and tails, and the "queen" of the colony had an enormous number of vertebrae, possibly resembling a snake with legs. The idea is that paleontologists misconstructed the skeletons, averaging the vertebrae out between all specimens, instead of giving most of them a single queen.

In reality, most of the animal species that have colonies with queens are fairly small insects, particularly termites, ants, bees, and wasps; with naked mole-rats as a famous exception. No sauropods or other reptiles are known to do so. Also, while queens are often larger specimens than their workers or drones, they always share the same general anatomy. The comic suggests however that regular sauropods have a vastly different anatomy than their supposed queens.

Additionally, it is obviously impossible that a single sauropod could have a neck anywhere near that long; it would collapse under its own weight. Insead, the comic shows it looping around several times without issue. In fact, (all) sauropods already have substantial skeletal adaptations just to accommodate their elongated necks.

The title-text references Spiders Georg, an internet meme character who allegedly eats over 10,000 spiders a day, skewing the average, creating the factoid that "the average person swallows 3 spiders a year."

Transcript

[Top panel: A sauropod with a normal long neck and tail, crossed out with a large red X.]

[Bottom panel: Two sauropods with very short necks and tails, with a green check mark drawn in between and an eel-like supposed "sauropod queen" situated above them, who is predominantly composed of sauropod necks winding off both sides of the panel, with a single head and tip of the tail visible. The sauropod queen and the sauropod on the left look at each other.]

[Caption below the comic:]

Thanks to modern paleontological reconstructions, we now know that most sauropods had short necks, and all those extra vertebrae belonged to the sauropod colony's queen.

Is this out of date? .

New here?

Last 7 days (Top 10)

Rank Score Pages Changes Username 1 23 19 23 TheusafBOT 2 11 7 11 Lp0 on fire 3 10 3 14 Barry Margolin 4 9 4 10 RadiantRainwing 5 8 6 7 Utdtutyabthsc 6 8 4 8 BunsenH 7 8 5 7 FaviFake 8 7 5 6 1234231587678 9 6 2 7 Vaedez 10 6 3 5 Kynde

Lots of people contribute to make this wiki a success. Many of the recent contributors, listed above, have just joined. You can do it too! Create your account here.

You can read a brief introduction about this wiki at explain xkcd. Feel free to sign up for an account and contribute to the wiki! We need explanations for comics, characters, themes, memes and everything in between. If it is referenced in an xkcd web comic, it should be here.

• If you're new to wikis like this, take a look at these help pages describing how to navigate the wiki, and how to edit pages.

• Discussion about various parts of the wiki is going on at Explain XKCD:Community portal. Share your 2¢!

• List of all comics contains a table of most recent xkcd comics and links to the rest, and the corresponding explanations. There are incomplete explanations listed here. Feel free to help out by expanding them!

• If you see that a new comic hasn't been explained yet, you can create it: Here's how.

Rules

Don't be a jerk. There are a lot of comics that don't have set in stone explanations; feel free to put multiple interpretations in the wiki page for each comic.

If you want to talk about a specific comic, use its discussion page.

Please only submit material directly related to —and helping everyone better understand— xkcd... and of course only submit material that can legally be posted (and freely edited). Off-topic or other inappropriate content is subject to removal or modification at admin discretion, and users who repeatedly post such content will be blocked.

If you need assistance from an admin, post a message to the Admin requests board.