When evolution just gives up
May 13, 2016
Damn, Megalonyx jeffersonii, you really let yourself go.
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.
Not much to say this time – the pictures tell the story for now.
It was a pretty transcendental experience, as I imagine it must be for anyone who loves dinosaurs, or has a pulse.
A huge thank-you to Dan Chure, the Park Paleontologist for the Monument, who conveyed us safely up and down the Wall, taught us about the prehistory of the site and the human history of its excavation and conservation, held scale bars, moved backpacks, took photos, and generally seemed to be having just as much fun as we were. This has been a common theme on the trip – every single person we’ve interacted with at a museum or fossil site has been unfailingly welcoming and generous with their time and knowledge. Whatever challenges vert paleo faces, a lack of wonderful people is not one of them.
I was up there, too, for the second time in my life – that will be a post for another day. For now, just bask in the glory of Mike basking in the glory of a literally mind-numbing array of amazing fossils.
Matt’s adventures in the Camarasaurus pit
May 7, 2016
At the Prehistoric Museum in Price, Utah, our host Ken Carpenter invited us to jump right into the Camarasaurus pit and start pulling apart their beautiful specimen. We did. Here is Matt, looking as happy as I’ve ever seen him:
The pit is the central exhibit of the museum’s palaeontology hall. You can look down on its Jurassic scene from the balcony above:
Theres a very nice Stegosaurus and an Allosaurus in pursuit of some kind of ornithopod, but needless to say the star of the show is the dead Camarasaurus that lies on the ground, well associated but partially articulated.
It’s a beautifully undistorted specimen, and we were amazed and delighted when Ken not only gave us permission to hop over the barrier and get closer to it, but even to move the elements around to better measure and photograph them. We spent the morning with the skeleton, concentrating on four anterior cervicals, and could happily have spent much, much longer.
A shot across the room at ground level:
Further bulletins as and when we find time to post. Can’t write more now, we’re off to the big wall of awesome at Dinosaur National Monument!
SV-POW! endorses Triceratops
May 6, 2016
Today, we were at the BYU Museum of Paleontology, which is in a ridiculously scenic setting with snow-capped mountains on the horizon in almost every direction.
We got through a lot of good work in collections, and we’ll show you some photos from there in due course. But for today, here are a couple of pictures from the public galleries.
First, here in a single photo is definitive proof that the “Toroceratops hypothesis” is wrong:
Say what you want about ontegenetic trajectories, that huge and well ossified Triceratops is not a juvenile of anything.
Good, glad we got that sorted out.
Meanwhile, at the even better end of the gallery, here is a very nice — and very well lit — cast of the famous articulated juvenile Camarasaurus specimen CM 11338 described by Gilmore (1925):
Further bulletins as events warrant.
References
Gilmore, Charles W. 1925. A nearly complete articulated skeleton of
Camarasaurus, a saurischian dinosaur from the Dinosaur National
Monument, Utah. Memoirs of the Carnegie Museum 10:347-384.
Gone
May 4, 2016
When I was back in Oklahoma in March, I met with Anne Weil to see some of the new Apatosaurus material she’s getting out of her Homestead Quarry. It’s nice material, but that’s a post for another day. Anne said something that really resonated with me, which was, “I love it when you guys post about vertebral morphology, because it helps me learn this stuff.” Okay, Anne, message received. This will begin to make things right.
I spent a week at BYU back in 2005, collecting data for my dissertation. One of the first things I had to do was teach myself how to identify the vertebrae of different sauropods, because BYU has just about all of the common Morrison taxa. These are the notes I made back then.
I always planned to do something with them – clean them up, get them into a more usable form. There are a lot of scribbly asides that are probably hard for others to read, and it would be more useful if I put the easily confused taxa next to each other – Barosaurus next to Brachiosaurus, for example. And I didn’t go into serial changes at all.
Still, hopefully someone will find these useful. If there are things I missed or got wrong, the comment thread is open. And if you want all four spreads in one convenient package, here’s a PDF: Wedel 2005 notes on Morrison sauropod cervicals
Mike and I leave for the Sauropocalypse tomorrow. I’m hoping to post at least a few pretty pictures from the road, as I did for the Mid-Mesozoic Field Conference two years ago. Stand by…
Publisher’s description here, Amazon page here.
I’ll have a lot more to say about this in the future, but the short version is that I met Mark Hallett at one of my first SVP meetings in 1997 or 1998. Way back then, he shared with me his vision of doing a big, lavishly illustrated book on sauropods. Fast forward to 2011, when Mark contacted me and asked if I’d be willing to serve as a reviewer for the sauropod book that he was writing. I told him that because I was on the tenure track I had to be pretty jealous with my time, so there was a limit to how much time I could invest as a reviewer. However, if he would take me on as junior author, the book would become part of my professional output and there would be no limit to how much time I could put into it (words that would turn out to be prophetic!). Mark agreed, and after 5 years of hard work, mostly on Mark’s part, here we are. The wheels are turning and with any luck the book will be out before the end of the year.
Mark and I owe a big debt of gratitude to the people who did agree to review the book: Kristi Curry Rogers, Carole Gee, John Hutchinson, and Paul Upchurch. We couldn’t have asked for a better team.
Stay tuned!
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 