This is a Galeamopus, roughly two feet long, sculpted by James Herrmann (who also made the life-size Aquilops sculpture and bust) for the Cincinnati Museum Center.
Here’s what it looks like on the other side.
From behind.
And from the front.
I dig this. I’m sure someone else must have done this half-skeletal reconstruction, half-fleshed life restoration style of sculpture before, but I can’t think of any museum-quality examples. The bronze is a nice touch.
Here’s a convincingly chunky Allosaurus.
About the sculpting process, James wrote (in an email with permission to cite):
I worked on all of the museum pieces with Glenn Storrs, Ph.D., vertebrate paleontologist with the Cincinnati Museum Center. He would tell me what he envisioned and provide me with reference material, I would sculpt it, take the clay to Glenn for his critique, take it back and make revisions. We went through several cycles of this for each piece and when I received the final approval I took each piece to the foundry.
Tyrannosaurs are to museums what roller-coasters are to amusement parks. Here’s Daspletosaurus.
My favorite thing about these sculptures is why they’re done in bronze. It’s not just for posterity. James again:
The idea was to provide a small sculpture of each skeletal reconstruction on display for people to touch and feel. It was felt that this element of touch would be particularly important to accommodate the needs of the visually impaired museum visitor. I will feel like I have achieved success when the patina is rubbed off parts of the bronze.
One more, a life-size bust of Galeamopus.
In addition to having these on display at the Cincinnati Museum Center, James will be producing these sculptures as limited editions. If you’re interested, please visit http://www.herrmannstudio.com/.
Two new sauropods in PeerJ today: Galeamopus pabsti (sp. nov) and Vouivria damparisensis (gen. et sp. nov.)
May 2, 2017
The best-preserved presacral vertebra of Vouivria damparisensis (Mannion et al. 2017: fig. 10).
New goodies out today in PeerJ: Tschopp and Mateus (2017) on the new diplodocid Galeamopus pabsti, and Mannion et al. (2017) redescribe and name the French ‘Bothriospondylus’ as Vouivria damparisensis.
C7 of Galeamopus pabsti (Tschopp and Mateus 2017: fig. 24).
Both papers are packed with interesting stuff that I simply don’t have time to discuss right now. Possibly Mike and I will come back with subsequent posts that discuss these critters in more detail. We both have a connection here besides our normal obsession with well-illustrated sauropods – Mike reviewed the Galeamopus paper, and I reviewed Vouivria. Happily, both sets of authors chose to publish the peer-review histories, so if you’re curious, you can go see what we said.
For now, I’ll just note that C7 of Galeamopus pabsti, shown above, is intriguingly similar in form to Vertebra ‘R’ of YPM 429, the ‘starship’ Barosaurus cervical (illustrated here). Mike and I spent a lot of time puzzling over the morphology of that vert before we convinced ourselves that much of its weirdness was due to taphonomic distortion and a restoration and paint job that obscured the fact that the metapophyses were missing. Given our ongoing project to unravel the wacky morphology of Barosaurus, I’m looking forward to digging into the morphology of G. pabsti in more detail.
I’ll surely irritate Mike by saying this, but my favorite figure in either paper is this one, Figure 4 from Tschopp and Mateus (2017). I can’t remember ever seeing an exploded skull diagram like this for a sauropod before, but it’s extremely helpful and I love it.
And that’s all for now. Go read these papers – they’re both substantial contributions with intriguing implications for the evolution of their respective clades. Congratulations to both sets of authors for producing such good work.
References
- (2017) The earliest known titanosauriform sauropod dinosaur and the evolution of Brachiosauridae. PeerJ 5:e3217 https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.3217
- (2017) Osteology of Galeamopus pabsti sp. nov. (Sauropoda: Diplodocidae), with implications for neurocentral closure timing, and the cervico-dorsal transition in diplodocids. PeerJ 5:e3179 https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.3179
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 