Accidental anaglyphs
October 16, 2020
Everyone knows that the very first thing you should do to improve your specimen photography is to use a tripod: it eliminates hand-shake and gives you much crisper photos. In most respects, my photographs have got much, much better since I’ve been habitually using a tripod.
But it has meant I’ve not been able to benefit from happy accidents like the one that gave me this 3D anaglyph of the Archbishop‘s Cervical S in dorsal view:
(Do you have red-cyan glasses? Yes? Good! You will be able to appreciate all the delicious morphological information in this photo. No? Go and order some right now — they cost literally a dollar.)
The reason I was able to make this very useful image is because back in the old pre-tripod days I would sometimes accidentally move a little bit between taking two more-or-less identical photographs. Here are the two images that I was able to composite into the anaglyph above:
Each of them is pretty uninformative alone: who can tell one nondescript area of brown bone from another? But when combined, they are extraordinarily more informative. If you don’t have 3D glasses then (A) get some! and (B) you can get some idea of how helpful the 3D information is from the crude wigglegram below, which simply switches back and forth between the two images.
And I can’t overstate how enormously helpful I have found these accidentally sourced anaglyphs as I write the descriptive part of the Archbishop manuscript. Even at this level of crudity, they have shown me several important points of morphology that I would certainly have missed if I’d been working only from my orthogonal-view photos, and saved me from more than one misinterpretation.
The moral is twofold:
- When taking specimen photographs, use a tripod — but deliberately get some pairs of shots where the camera is moved to the side by about 7 cm (the distance between the pupils in an average human).
- If you don’t have any red-cyan glasses, get some!
Hey, Mike! Why haven’t you been blogging much lately?
October 14, 2020
Well, one reason is the utterly rancid “block editor” that WordPress has started imposing with increasing insistence on its poor users. If there is one thing that world really doesn’t need, it’s a completely new way of writing text. Seriously, WordPress, that was a solved problem in 1984. As Henry Spencer very nearly said back in the eighties, “thy creativity is better used in solving problems than in creating beautiful new impediments to productivity“.
But enough pointless whining: instead, check out this bad boy:
Taylor (in prep. for 2020: Figure V). NHMUK PV R5937, “The Archbishop”, cervical vertebra V (most anterior preserved cervical vertebra, probably C6), left side still encased in plaster. A. Reconstruction of right lateral view with neural spine, prezygapophysis, diapophysis, condyle, cotyle and cervical rib restored. The prezygapophysis from the succeeding vertebra that has adhered to this element is shown in red. B. Dorsal view with anterior to the right. C. Posterior view. D. Right lateral view. E. Anterior view. F. Ventral view with anterior to the right. Scale bar 20 cm.
Yes, it’s your friend and mine, The Archbishop! It’s a big titanosauriform sauropod excavated by F. W. H. Migeod for the British Museum (Natural History) back in 1930, from the same Tendaguru Formation that yielded the awesome Giraffatitan specimens in the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin.
Yes, I admit I have been working on the Archbishop for more than sixteen years, and that I gave a talk about it at SVPCA 2005, and that I failed utterly to get it done as part of the Paleo Project Challenge 2010, and that as early as 2011 I was in despair about ever finishing it, and that I promised to do it by SVPCA 2016 but didn’t.
But in 2018 I did something significant, which was to actually start writing the paper in public. Now anyone can follow the progress of the project — and it’s progressing. The manuscript currently runs to about fifty printed pages, although that length is inflated by twenty-odd beautiful illustrations — of which the “Cervical V” image above is just one. (Do click through to see it in all its glory.)
So, yeah. That’s the main reason I am not blogging much. Because I am writing the paper. Finally.
You! Shall not! Pass!
August 22, 2020
OK, technically this is MB.R.3822, a dorsal vertebra of Giraffatitan brancai formerly known as HMN Ar1, in posterior view, rendered from a 3D scan provided by Heinrich Mallison.
But you can’t tell me that when you look at that you don’t see Gandalf shouting at a balrog.
Long before Matt and others were CT-scanning sauropod vertebrae to understand their internal structure, Werner Janensch was doing it the old-fashioned way. I’ve been going through old photos that I took at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin back in 2005, and I stumbled across this dorsal centrum:
Dorsal vertebra centum of ?Giraffatitan in ventral view, with anterior to top.
You can see a transverse crack running across it, and sure enough the front and back are actually broken apart. Here there are:
The same dorsal vertebral centrum of ?Giraffatitan, bisected transversely in two halves. Left: anterior half in posterior view; right: posterior half in anterior view. I had to balance the anterior half on my shoe to keep it oriented corrrectly for the photo.
This does a beautiful job of showing the large lateral foramina penetrating into the body of the centrum and ramifying further into the bone, leaving only a thin midline septum.
But students of the classics will recognise this bone immediately as the one that Janensch (1947:abb. 2) illustrated the posterior half of in his big pneumaticity paper:
It’s a very strange feeling, when browsing in a collection, to come across a vertebra that you know from the literature. As I’ve remarked to Matt, it’s a bit like running into, say, Cameron Diaz in the corner shop.
Reference
- Janensch, W. 1947. Pneumatizitat bei Wirbeln von Sauropoden
und anderen Saurischien. Palaeontographica, supplement
7:1-25.
The Nanoblock Brachiosaurus
May 2, 2020
My eldest son Dan went out to visit his girlfriend Beth, shortly before the Coronavirus crisis began, during her university placement in Toulouse. While they were there, they bought me this gift:
As you can see, it’s a Lego-like self-assembly kit; but as you can also see from the mug in the background, it’s tiny. As best I can make out, the blocks are half the length and width of Lego blocks, and about third the height. The whole model is about seven or eight inches (18-20 cm) from nose to tail.
Here’s a very quick walk-round, so you can appreciate the 3d shape.
I am properly impressed with this. It has the shape of the ribcage right, and the hips and shoulders, and the proportions are right so that it conveys with absolute conviction the quality of brachiosaurosity. It has a very posable neck that can be placed in a realistic life posture, and there are even hints of scapulae and ilia.
I made only one change from the instructions: I reoriented the forefoot so that we have a vertically oriented arcade of metacarpals rather than a plantigrade forefoot.
It was a very picky build. The instructions recommend using Nanoblock tweezers, sold separately, but I just used my big clumsy fingers, so that ribs and legs and things were constantly falling off. The process was rather like what this video shows, but much slower.
If you want one of your own, you can get it from Amazon UK or from Amazon US. I recommend it for serious sauropod lovers, but would be infuriating for children, and requires patience and precision to assemble.
Oh, and kit came with plenty of spare parts, in case you lose some of them: enough that Dan was able to make a juvenile with the leftovers.
Storm Giant
March 12, 2020
Matt Wedel will be yapping about Brachiosaurus at the Burpee Museum PaleoFest this year
February 25, 2020
Challenge: can you spot the Iguanodon pelvis in this photo?
Big news: I will be at the Burpee Museum PaleoFest this year. I’m speaking at 10:30 AM on Sunday, March 8. The title of my talk is, “In the Footsteps of Giants: Finding and Excavating New Fossils of Brachiosaurus from the Lower Morrison Formation in Utah”. Brian Engh, John Foster, and ReBecca Hunt-Foster are all coauthors.
The main page for PaleoFest 2020 is here (link), and on the right side of that page there’s a block of quick links to the speaker list, daily schedules, and so on. If you’re in the Midwest and not already booked for the weekend of March 7-8, come on out and I’ll talk your legs off about dinosaurs.
The photo above is of me at a table at the Raymond M. Alf Museum Fossil Fest on February 8, 2020. It’s nothing to do with the Burpee PaleoFest, I just needed a photo of me talkin’ Brachiosaurus. And yes, you can have that t-shirt — objectively the greatest in the history of the universe — when you cut it off my cold, dead carcass. (Or you can order your own; this model is the “Retro Brontosaurus Dinosaur T-shirt” by Dinosaur Tees and the Amazon link is here.)
The SV-POW! Patreon adds a tier
February 18, 2020
I swear I’m not making this up: I was recently contacted by one of our patrons, who said he’d like to support us at the SV-POW! Patreon at $10/month. We didn’t have that tier at the time, only $1/mo. and $5/mo. So to accommodate him, and any others who theoretically might like to support us at that level, we created a $10 tier. There’s a new reward to go with this tier: in addition to being acknowledged in any papers that get written as a result of a trip that you help to fund, at $10/month you’ll also get an 8×10 art print once a year, either one of my skull drawings or a photograph, signed or unsigned. Here’s the link.
Our support is up to $57/mo. That might not sound like much, but $7/mo. is $84/yr., which is what we wanted when Mike launched the Patreon so we could get rid of ads on the site. The other $50/mo. is $600/yr., which is roughly the cost of a trans-Atlantic plane ticket. So that’s already one Matt-and-Mike get-together a year to do research and write papers, in addition to any others we were going to do anyway.
What would we do with more support? More research, and more writing. I get small grants now and then, and I get a yearly travel budget from my department, but grant-writing takes time away from research and paper-writing, and the departmental travel money doesn’t cover all the things I’d like to do. For example, I skipped SVPCA in 2018 so I could visit the Carnegie last spring. That’s a tough choice, a whole conference worth of ideas and conversations that I missed out on. And Mike is basically self-funded. We’re pretty good at converting travel money into new ideas and new data, and we’re going to start doing writing retreats where we hole up someplace cheap, far from museums, field sites, and other distractions, and just write. So if you like the stuff we do, please consider supporting us–we promise not to waste your donation.
Many thanks to everyone who supports our work, and to everyone else for sitting through this post. In the spirit of giving you more than you asked for, up top is the cervicodorsal transition in Giraffatitan brancai, MB.R.2181, in my favorite, inconvenient portrait orientation. And here’s a version with the centrum lengths and posterior widths given in cm. From Janensch (1950: figs. 49 and 50).
Reference
Janensch, Werner. 1950. Die Wirbelsaule von Brachiosaurus brancai. Palaeontographica (Suppl. 7) 3: 27-93.
Matt’s Brachiosaurus in the wild
February 16, 2020
No, not his new Brachiosaurus humerus — his photograph of the Chicago Brachiosaurus mount, which he cut out and cleaned up seven years ago:
This image has been on quite a journey. Since Matt published this cleaned-up photo, and furnished it under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC By) licence, it has been adopted as the lead image of Wikipedia’s Brachiosaurus page [archvied]:
Consequently (I assume) it has now become Google’s top hit for brachiosaurus skeleton:
Last Saturday, Fiona and I went to Birdland, a birds-only zoo in the Cotswolds, about an hour away from where we live. The admission price also includes “Jurassic Journey”, a walking tour of a dozen or so not-very-good dinosaur models. In an interpretive centre in this area, I found this Brachiosaurus skeletal reconstruction stencilled on the wall:
I immediately knew it was the Chicago mount due to the combination of Giraffatitan anterior dorsals and Brachiosaurus posterior dorsals; but I found it more hauntingly familiar than that. A quick hunt turned up Matt’s seven-year-old post, and when I told Matt about my discovery he filled me in on its use in Wikipedia.
So this is 99% of a good story: we’re delighted that this work is out there, and has resulted in a much better Brachiosaurus image at Birdland than the rather sad-looking Stegosaurus next to it. The only slight disappointment is that I couldn’t find any sign of credit, which they really should have included given that Matt put the image out under CC By rather than in the public domain.
But as Matt said: “Even though I didn’t get credited, I’m always chuffed to see my stuff out in the world.” So true.
Make a scale model Brachiosaurus humerus from chicken bones
February 9, 2020
This is the Jurassic World Legacy Collection Brachiosaurus. I think it might be an exclusive at Target stores here in the US. It turns up on other sites, like Amazon and eBay, but usually from 3rd-party sellers and with a healthy up-charge. Retails for 50 bucks. I got mine for Christmas from Vicki and London. Here’s the link to Target.com if you want to check it out (we get no kickbacks from this).
I thought it would be cool to leverage this thing at outreach events to talk about the new Brachiosaurus humerus that Brian Engh found last year, which a team of us got out of the ground and safely into a museum last October (full story here). But I needed a Brachiosaurus humerus, so I made one, and in this post I’ll show you how to do the same, for next to no money.
Depending on what base you start with and what materials you use, you could build a scale model of a Brachiosaurus humerus at any size. I wanted one that would match the JWLC Brach, so I started by taking some measurements of that. Here’s what I got:
Lengths
- Head: 45mm
- Neck: 455mm (x 20 = 9.1m = 29’10”)
- Torso: 320mm
- Tail: 320mm
- Total: 1140 (x 20 = 22.8m = 74’10”)
Heights
- Max head height: 705mm (x 20 = 14.1m = 46’3″)
- Withers height: 360mm (x 20 = 7.2m = 23’7″)
The neck length, total length, and head height are pretty close to the mounted Giraffatitan in Berlin. The withers are a little high, as is the bottom of the animal’s belly. I suspect that the limbs on the model are oversized by about 10%. Nevertheless, the numbers say this thing is roughly 1/20 scale.
The largest humeri of Brachiosaurus and Giraffatitan are 213cm, which is about 3mm shy of 7 feet. So a 1/20 scale humerus should be 106.5mm, or 4.2 inches, or four-and-a-quarter if you want a nice, round number.
Incidentally, Chris Pratt is 6’2″ (74 inches), and the Owen Grady action figure is 3.75″, which is 1/20 of 6’3″. So the action figure, the Brachiosaurus toy highly detailed scientific model, and a ~4.2″ humerus model will all be more or less in scale with each other.
I used a chicken humerus for my base. The vast majority of chickens in the US are slaughtered at 5 months, so they don’t get nearly big enough for their humeri to be useful for this project. Fortunately, there’s a pub in downtown Claremont, Heroes & Legends, that has giant mutant chicken hot wings, so I went there and collected chicken bones in the guise of a date. The photo above shows three right humeri (on the left) and one left humerus (on the right) after simmering and an overnight degreasing in a pot of soapy water. I used the same bone clean-up methods as in this post.
What should you do if you don’t have access to giant mutant chicken wings? My method of Brachio-mimicry involves some sculpting, so any reasonably straight bone that bells out a bit at the ends would work. You could use a drumstick in a pinch. Here are my humeri whitening in a tub of 3% hydrogen peroxide from the dollar store down the street.
Brachiosaurid humeri vary somewhat but they all have certain features in common. Here’s the right humerus of Vouivria, modified from Mannion et al. (2017: fig. 19) to show the features of interest to brachiosaur humerus-sculptors. The arrows on the far left point to a couple of corners, one where the deltopectoral crest (dpc in the figure) meets the proximal articular surface, and the other where the articular surface meets the long sweeping curve of the medial border of the humeral shaft.
Here’s a more printer-friendly version of the same diagram. Why did I use Vouivria for this instead of one of the humeri of Brachiosaurus itself? Mostly because it’s a complete humerus for which a nice multi-view was available. Runner-up in this category would have to go to the humerus of Pelorosaurus conybeari figured by Upchurch et al. (2015: fig. 18) in the Haestasaurus paper–here’s a direct link to that figure.
I knew that I’d be doing some sculpting, and I wanted a scale template to work off of, so I made these outlines from the Giraffatitan humerus figured by Janensch (1950) and reproduced by Mike in this post (middle two), and from the aforementioned Pelorosaurus conybeari humerus shown by Mike in this post (outer two). I scaled this diagram so that when printed to fill an 8.5×11 piece of printer paper, the humerus outlines would all be 4.25″–the same nice-round-number 1/20 scale target found above. Here’s a PDF version: Giraffatitan and Pelorosaurus humeri outlines for print.
Here’s the largest of my giant mutant chicken humeri, compared to the outlines. The chicken humerus isn’t bad, but it’s too short for 1/20 scale, the angles of the proximal and distal ends are almost opposite what they should be, and the deltopectoral crest is aimed out antero-laterally instead of facing straight anteriorly. Modification will be required!
Here’s my method for lengthing the humerus: I cut the midshaft of another humerus out, and swapped it in to the middle of the prospective Brachiosaurus model humerus.
To my immense irritation, I failed to get a photo of the lengthened humerus before I started sculpting on it. In the first wave of sculpting, I built up the proximal end and the deltopectoral crest, but missed some key features. On the right, I glued the proximal and distal ends of the donor humerus together; I might make this into a Haestasaurus humerus in the future.
I should mention my tools and materials. I have a Dremel but it wasn’t charged the evening I sat down to do this, so I made all the humerus cuts with a small, cheap hacksaw. I used superglue (cyanoacrylate or CA) for quick joins, and white glue (polyvinyl acetate or PVA) to patch holes, and I put gobs of PVA into the humeral shafts before sealing them up. For additive sculpting I used spackling compound, same stuff you use to patch holes in walls and ceilings, and for reductive sculpting I used sandpaper. I got most of this stuff from the dollar store.
Here we are after a second round of sculpting. The proximal end has its corners now, and the distal end is more accurately belled out, maybe even a bit too wide. It’s not a perfect replica of either the Giraffatitan or Pelorosaurus humeri, but it got sufficiently into the brachiosaurid humerus morphospace for my taste. A more patient or dedicated sculptor could probably make recognizable humeri for each brachiosaurid taxon or even specimen. I deliberately left it a bit rough in hopes that it would read as timeworn, fractured, and restored when painted and mounted. Again, a real sculptor could make some hay here by putting in fake cracks and so on.
The cheap spackling compound I picked up did not harden as much as some other I have used in the past. I had planned on sealing anyway before I painted, and for porous materials a quick, cheap sealant is white glue mixed with water. Here that coat of diluted PVA is drying, and I’m holding up a spare chicken humerus to show how far the model humerus has come.
Before painting, I drilled into the distal end with a handheld electric drill, and used a bamboo barbeque skewer as a mounting rod and handle. I hit it with a couple of coats of gray primer, then a couple of coats of black primer the next day. I could have gotten fancier with highlights and washes and so on, but I was scrambling to get this done for a public outreach event, in an already busy week.
And here’s the finished-for-now product. A couple of gold-finished cardboard gift boxes from my spare box storage gave their lids to make a temporary pedestal. When I get a version of this model that I’m really happy with, either by hacking further on this one or starting from scratch on a second, I’d love to get a wooden or stone trophy base with a little engraved plaque that looks like a proper museum exhibit, and replace the bamboo skewer with a brass rod. But for now, I’m pretty happy with this.
The idea of making dinosaurs out of chicken bones isn’t original with me. I was inspired by the wonderful books Make Your Own Dinosaur Out of Chicken Bones and T-Rex To Go, both by Chris McGowan. Used copies of both books can be had online for next to nothing, and I highly recommend them both.
If this post helps you in making your own model Brachiosaurus humerus, I’d love to see the results. Please let me know about your model in the comments, and happy building!
References
- Janensch, Werner. 1950. Die Wirbelsaule von Brachiosaurus brancai. Palaeontographica (Suppl. 7) 3: 27-93.
- (2017) The earliest known titanosauriform sauropod dinosaur and the evolution of Brachiosauridae. PeerJ 5:e3217 https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.3217
- Upchurch, Paul, Philip D. Mannion and Micahel P Taylor. 2015. The Anatomy and Phylogenetic Relationships of “Pelorosaurus” becklesii (Neosauropoda, Macronaria) from the Early Cretaceous of England. PLoS ONE 10(6):e0125819. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0125819
