Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

I was back in Utah the week before last, looking for monsters with Brian Engh and Jessie Atterholt. It was a successful hunt – more about that another time.

We made a run to Fruita, Colorado, to visit Dinosaur Journey. I was just there in May, picking up Haplocanthosaurus caudals for CT scanning (and other fun things). We picked up another specimen this time, for a different project – more on that in another post, too.

Not this one, but like this one. An apatosaurine middle caudal vertebra, MWC 5742, in left lateral view.

There’s a nice ceratopsian exhibit up at Dinosaur Journey right now, with cast skulls from many of the new ceratopsians that have been described in the past couple of decades. My near-favorites were Zuniceratops and Diabloceratops, both of which are small enough that they must have been adorable in life (think pony-sized and big-horse-sized, respectively).

My absolute favorite, of course, was this little thing:

I can tell you exactly how Aquilops came to be on display there. Julia McHugh printed a copy of the holotype, because it’s freely available to the world. And she used Brian’s Aquilops head recon in the signage (correctly, with attribution), because it’s also freely available to the world. In fact, I’ve seen Aquilops on display at several museums now for just those reasons. So, folks, if you want your critters to be seen, make them open. Hiring a paleoartist to do some awesome artwork that can be released under a CC-BY license (because you paid them, not because you asked them to give their art away for “exposure”) is a huge help.

We had to geek out a little about unexpectedly finding ‘our’ dinosaur on display:

But of course it is not our dinosaur anymore – that’s the whole point. Aquilops belongs to the world.

For more on our trip, see Jessie’s posts here, here, and here.