Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

After P.A.S.T president Gilles Danis commented on our post about the Chicago airport Brachiosaurus mount, I got into an interesting email conversation with him. Here, posted with his kind permission and only lightly edited, are his thoughts on the Brachiosaurus mount.

Brachiosaurus mount at Chicago O’Hare Airport, terminal one. Pelvis in ventral view, anterior to the left.

Gilles writes:

The story of this mount (s) is chequered. The casts of real material include the sacrum, the caudal, a number of dorsals, some rib fragments, one femur, a very badly eroded humerus and a coracoid. [Update: also the right ilium, as Gilles subsequently confirmed by email.]

On the mount that was in the museum and later was moved to the airport, we had a peculiar situation to deal with. Because museums like to have people walking under the rib cage of high sauropods, this becomes a safety hazard for two reasons. The first is that it cannot be allowed to fall on the people (obviously) and even though the cast was of light plastic, the engineers insisted in overbuilding the support (namely the legs and arms). Also because while in the Field Museum, it stood in the path of a fire exit, we had to have a certain amount of distance between the front and hind limbs (I forget the exact measurement). The only way that we could achieve that was to add two vertebrae for a total of 12 dorsals. We chose to duplicate two of real vertebrae at the lower end of the dorsal section.

The Brachiosaurus mount in its original position in the main hall of the Field Museum. I can’t find a higher resolution version of this photo — can anyone help?

The funny thing is only one person figured that one out and that was Bill Simpson the collections manager. Also to support this structure, we were asked to used way oversized steel in the limbs which meant that we had to “inflate” the real humerus and femur to accommodate the material. This is why the cast is so bad; it is half stuffing.

It is interested to see how a lie perpetuates itself. The following year, the Hayashibara museum ordered a mount of the same skeleton and they were very interested in getting the distance between the feet and manus. So we, again, had to make a Brachiosaurus limoensis.

Not satisfied with this silly situation, Disney came to us in 1996 and ordered that very same skeleton again with the stretch limo factor for another dinosaur that you walk under for the Wild Animal Kingdom park in Orlando. Up to that point, only Bill Simpson had realized the error. But I had just had it up to there with these stretch dinosaurs and revealed the problem. After that, in 1999, we replaced the skeleton in Stanley Field Hall with one on the terrace to make room for Sue the T. rex. On this Brachiosaurus, we have the normal 10 dorsals. The last Brachiosaurus we mounted is in the North American Museum of Ancient Life (N.A.M.A.L.) at Thanksgiving Point, Lehi, Utah, again a normal skeleton.

If this was not enough we restored Seismosaurus halli (now Diplodocus hallorum). This project was sponsored by a Japanese company who was to get the first mount. They took Gillette’s publication and read that the skeleton would have been 150′ long or 50 meters. We soon realized that there was a mistake, that the tail was not missing a huge section but had simply drifted away from the sacrum and the skeleton would not be even close to the predicted length. The Japanese would have none of it. After months of negotiations, we arrived at a compromise and we made the skeleton 40 meters long, 133’+ by adding some whiplash vertebrae until it was that long. By then I had had enough and threw in the towel but not before mounting another Seismosaurus for the museum is Albuquerque which is correct.

As for the Berlin brachiosaur: I spent some time in Berlin measuring, photographing and drawing (Donna Sloan did the drawing) the original material there, but they would not allow us to mould it. What I found interesting is that in 1992 when I was there, most of the skeleton of the mount was not original but it was not cast either. It was sculpted wood.

I have many more tails (pun, ha,ha) about sauropods. I should write them down sometime.

Many thanks to Gilles for allowing us to reproduce this important information.

Gilles’ list of real material that was cast for the mount includes very nearly all of the holotype FMNH P25107 — assuming that “a number of dorsals” means seven, the number that Riggs excavated and had prepared. The only fossil elements not apparently appearing are the fragmentary first caudal and the right ilium. But it seems to me from some of my photos of the airport mount (see the image at the top) that a cast of the right ilium was used. [Update: yes, Gilles confirmed by email that the right ilium was indeed cast from real material.]

Regarding the number of dorsal vertebrae: it may have been circumstances that forced P.A.S.T to give the mount 12 dorsals, but Migeod’s pre-description of the NHM’s Tendaguru brachiosaur gives good reason to think this is likely the correct count.

Similarly, although the torso was therefore longer than Gilles had intended, it might have ended up correct, as careful comparison of the lengths of the Brachiosaurus and Giraffatitan dorsals suggests that the torso of the former was about 23% longer.

To my shame, I’d not realised that the Brachiosaurus at the airport has two more dorsals than the one in the Field Museum picnic area, despite Matt having posted a ventral-view photo of the airport mount that clearly shows the twelve dorsals and a lateral-view photo of the museum mount that clearly shows ten.

When Gilles says “most of the skeleton of the [Berlin] mount was not original but it was not cast either”, I assume he’s referring to the presacral vertebrae, which as Janensch explained in his 1950 paper about that mount were too heavy and fragile to mount. The sculptures in Janensch’s mount were not particularly good, but they have been replaced by much better ones in the remount.