Fun and games at the BYU museum
May 12, 2016
Things remain frantic on the Sauropocalypse tour. Today, we were back at the BYU Museum of Paleontology, working on four or five separate projects. Here’s Matt, photographing broken bone of the iconic Supersaurus cervical BYU 9024, while a pallet of Big Pink Apatosaur cervicals wait for attention in the background:
You’ve seen this bone before – I first posted on it 8 years ago this month, and it turned up again here and here. It is still the longest known vertebra of any animal that has ever lived.
And here’s Mike, getting Jensen’s sculpture of the same vertebra down from storage to compare it to the original:
In Jensen’s (1985) original description of this vertebra – which he at first referred to Ultrasauros – the only relevant illustration he included was one of the model, so it was good to see this bit of history in the flesh (Jensen did include photos of the actual bone in later papers). We’ll show the two vertebrae, real and sculpted, side by side in a future post.
References
- Jensen, J. A. 1985. Three new sauropod dinosaurs from the Upper Jurassic of Colorado. Great Basin Naturalist 45, 697-709.
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 
May 15, 2016 at 12:25 am
So, does the Brigham Young Museum of palaeontology share storage space with an art gallery? I mean, that’s an interesting piece of abstract sculpture that Mike is manhandling, but a BONE?
;)
May 15, 2016 at 12:47 am
It’s not a real bone, of course, but a sculpture of what Jim Jensen thought the big Supersaurus cervical looked like in life.
August 24, 2016 at 2:28 am
And to think, now this cervical seemingly belongs to a mythically proportioned Barosaurus. Oh Paleontology, you never cease to amaze me.
September 16, 2016 at 9:44 pm
[…] that I and Matt were right in our SVPCA talk this year, and the “Supersaurus” cervical BYU 9024 really is the C9 of a gigantic Barosaurus. As we noted in our abstract, its total length of 1370 mm […]
October 11, 2016 at 6:46 pm
[…] when we went to see the holotype YPM 429, and BYU really couldn’t have done more for us on our recent visit. This is what we would hope for, of course. But what we didn’t particularly anticipate is how […]
June 15, 2019 at 5:39 pm
[…] Three Baro Jacket in BYU collections sits the single longest vertebra of anything ever discovered: our old friend BYU 9024 (what Jensen called BYU 5003), which was originally assigned to Ultrasaurus (Jensen 1985), then […]