Apatosaurus cervical ribs and the tyranny of 2D images
December 8, 2022
Some quick backstory: lots of sauropods have long, overlapping cervical ribs, like the ones shown here in Sauroposeidon (diagram from this old post):
These long cervical ribs are ossified tendons of ventral neck muscles, presumably longus colli ventralis. We know they’re ossified tendons because of their bone histology (Klein et al. 2012), and we suspect that they’re longus colli ventralis because those tendons look the same in birds, just less ossified, as in this rhea (same specimens as these even older posts: 1, 2):
Diplodocoids have apomorphically short cervical ribs, which never extend very far past the end of their respective centra and sometimes don’t overlap at all. Still, we assume the long ventral neck muscles were there, just without long ossified tendons. Which brings me to Apatosaurus, which has cervical ribs that are anteroposteriorly short but famously massive, extending very below and/or to the sides of the cervical centra — for a truly breathtaking example see this post. Here are C3 through C7 in CM 3018, the holotype of Apatosaurus lousiae (Gilmore 1936: plate 24):
At least for me, it’s hard to resist the temptation to mentally scoot those vertebrae together into articulation, and imagine that the very swoopy-looking and maybe even down-turned cervical ribs allowed the ventral tendon bundles to wrap around the bottom of each cervical rib protuberance, something like this:
But it’s just not so, because like all 2D images, Gilmore’s plate distorts 3D reality. If you get to see the mounted skeleton in person, it’s clear that the cervical ribs are all more or less in line, and none of them are pointed at the big protuberances, which stick way out ventrolaterally.
Here I’ve drawn in the likely trajectories of the longus colli ventralis tendons. My little red pathways don’t precisely match the cervical ribs as mounted, but there’s a lot of distortion and restoration going on. For example, comparing with Gilmore’s plate we can see that the cervical ribs of C5, which point downward compared to all the others, only do that because someone forced them to — the whole anterior portion of the rib, where the shaft would actually join to the capitulum and tuberculum, is reconstructed. Even if I’m a little off, it’s clear that the cervical ribs shafts point backward, they’re all more or less in two parallel lines, and none of them point down and out toward the ventrolateral processes. The photo contains a mountain of useful morphological information that you’d never get from the lateral views.
My takeaways from all this:
- If a person has only seen 2D images of a specimen, and especially if those 2D images have only been orthogonal views with no obliques, their little island of knowledge is surrounded by at least a sizeable lake of ignorance, if not a small ocean.
- That doesn’t mean that seeing specimens in person is the only antidote — 3D models and 3D prints are extremely useful, and for specimens that are difficult to manipulate because of their size or fragility, they may be more useful than seeing or handling the specimen, at least for some questions.
- For Apatosaurus specifically, those ventrolateral processes cry out for explanation. They’re fairly solid knobs of bone that stick way out past the ossified tendons of the ventral-most neck muscles. That’s a super-weird — and super-expensive — place to invest a bunch of bone if you’re not using it for something fairly important, especially in a lineage that had just spent the last 80-100 million years making their necks as light as possible.
- Pursuant to that last point, we’re now in — ugh-ouch-shame — our 8th year of BrontoSMASH!!, with still just the one conference presentation to show for it (Taylor et al. 2015). Prolly time we got moving on that again.
References
- Klein, N., Christian, A., & Sander, P. M. (2012). Histology shows that elongated neck ribs in sauropod dinosaurs are ossified tendons. Biology letters, 8(6), 1032-1035.
- Taylor, M.P., Wedel, M.J., Naish, D., and Engh, B. 2015. Were the necks of Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus adapted for combat? 63rd Symposium on Vertebrate Palaeontology and Comparative Anatomy, Meeting Proceedings, p. 71, and PeerJ PrePrints 3:e1347v1. https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1347v1
Who is who in this 1903 Carnegie Museum photo?
November 8, 2022
In a paper that I’m just finishing up now, we want to include this 1903 photo of Carnegie Museum personnel:
A few weeks ago I asked for help on Twitter in identifying the people shown here, and I got a lot of useful contributions.
But since then I have seen the Carnegie photo library catalogue for this image (it’s #1010), and it gives names as follows:
- Far left, mostly cropped from image: field worker William H. Utterback
- Seated, facing right: field worked Olof A. Peterson
- Standing at back: preparator Louis Coggeshall (Arthur’s brother)
- Seated, looking to camera: preparator Charles W. Gilmore
- Seated at far table: field worker Earl Douglass
- Standing behind far table: chief preparator Arthur S. Coggeshall
- Sitting at far table, facing left: preparator Asher W. VanKirk
- Seated: illustrator Sydney Prentice
- Sitting on bench: John Bell Hatcher, whose description of Diplodocus carnegii had been published two years previously
Those of you who know a bit of history, do these identifications seem good? Some of the suggestions I got align well with these, but others do not. For example, a lot of people thought that the person here identified as Louis Coggeshall was his better-known brother Arthur.
I’d appreciate any confirmation or contradiction.
Vertebrae of Haplocanthosaurus (A-C) and a giraffe (D-F) illustrating three ways of orienting a vertebra: articular surfaces vertical — or at least the caudal articular surface vertical (A and D), floor of the neural canal horizontal (B and E), and similarity in articulation (C and F). See the paper for details! Taylor and Wedel (2002: fig. 6).
This is a lovely cosmic alignment: right after the 15th anniversary of this blog, Mike and I have our 11th coauthored publication (not counting abstracts and preprints) out today.
This one started back in 2018, with Mike’s post, What does it mean for a vertebra to be “horizontal”? That post and subsequent posts on the same topic (one, two, three) provoked interesting discussions in the comment threads, and convinced us that there was something here worth grappling with. We gave a presentation on the topic at the 1st Palaeontological Virtual Congress that December, which we made available as a preprint, which led to us writing the paper in the open, which led to another preprint (of the paper this time, not the talk).
Orienting vertebrae with the long axis of the centrum held horizontally seems simple enough, but choosing landmarks can be surprisingly complex. Taylor and Wedel (2022 fig. 5).
This project represented some interesting watersheds for us. It was not our first time turning a series of blog posts into a paper — see our 2013 paper on neural spine bifurcation for that — but it was our first time writing a joint paper in the open (Mike had started writing the Archbishop description in the open a few months earlier). It was also the last, or at least the most recent, manuscript that we released as a preprint, although we’ve released some conference presentations as preprints since then. I’m much less interested in preprints than I used to be, for reasons explained in this post, and I think Mike sees them as rather pointless if you’re writing the paper in the open anyway, which is his standard approach these days (Mike, feel free to correct me here or in the comments if I’m mischaracterizing your position).
So, we got it submitted, we got reviews, and then…we sat on them for a while. We have both struggled in the last few years with Getting Things Done, or at least Getting Things Finished (Mike’s account, my own), and this paper suffered from that. Part of the problem is that Mike and have far too many projects going at any one time. At last count, we have about 20 joint projects in various stages of gestation, and about 11 more that we’ve admitted we’re never going to get to (our To Don’t list), and that doesn’t count our collaborations with others (like the dozen or so papers I have planned with Jessie Atterholt). We simply can’t keep so many plates spinning, and we’re both working hard at pruning our project list and saying ‘no’ to new things — or, if we do think of new projects, we try to hand them off to others as quickly and cleanly as possible.
Two different ways of looking at a Haplocanthosaurus tail vertebra. Read on for a couple of recent real-life examples. Taylor and Wedel (2022: fig. 2).
Anyway, Mike got rolling on the revisions a few months ago, and it was accepted for publication sometime in late spring or early summer, I think. Normally it would have been published in days, but the Journal of Paleontological Techniques was moving between websites and servers, and that took a while. But Mike and I were in no tearing rush, and the paper is out today, so all is well.
One of the bits of the paper that I’m most proud of is the description of cheap and easy methods for determining the orientation of the neural canal. For neural canals that are open, either because they were fully prepped or never full of matrix to begin with, there’s the rolled-up-piece-of-paper method, which I believe first appeared on the blog back when I was posting photos of the tail vertebrae of the Brachiosaurus altithorax holotype. For neural canals that aren’t open, Mike came up with the Blu-tack-and-toothpick method, as shown in Figure 12 in the new paper:
A 3d print of NHMUK PV R2095, the holotype of Xenoposeidon, illustrating the toothpick method of determining neural canal orientation. Taylor and Wedel (2022: fig. 12).
I know both methods work because I recently had occasion to use them, studying the Haplocanthosaurus holotypes (see this post). For CM 572, the neural canal of the first caudal vertebra is full of matrix, so I used a variant of the toothpick method. I didn’t actually have Blu-tack or toothpicks, so I cut thin pieces of plastic from the edge of an SVP scale bar and stuck them in bits of kneadable eraser. It worked just fine:
The neural canal of caudal 2 was prepped, so I could use the rolled-up-piece-of-paper method:
(Incidentally, Mike and I refer to our low-tech orientation-visualizers as “neural-canal-inators”, in honor of Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz from Phineas and Ferb.)
In the above photos, notice how terribly thin the base of the neural arch is, antero-posteriorly. Both of these vertebrae are in pretty good shape, without much breakage or missing material, and their morphology is broadly consistent with that of other proximal caudals of Haplocanthosaurus, so we can’t write this off as distortion. As weird as it looks, this is just what Haplo proximal caudals were like. And with the neural canals held horizontally, the first two caudals end up oriented like so:
Now, as we pointed out in the paper, the titular question is not about determining the posture of the vertebrae in life, it’s about defining the directions ‘cranial’ and ‘caudal’ for isolated vertebrae — Mike asked the question back when for the holotype (single) dorsal vertebra of Xenoposeidon. But an interesting spin-off for me has been getting confronted with the weirdness of vertebrae whose articular surfaces are nowhere near orthogonal with their neural canals. I tilted those CM 572 Haplo caudals so that their neural canals were horizontal partly because that’s the preferred orientation that Mike and I landed on in the course of this work, but also partly because to me, that’s a more arresting image than the preceding ones with the articular faces held vertically. I’m both freaked out and fascinated, and that seems like a promising combination — there are mysteries here that cry out to be solved.
As usual, we have loads of people to thank. In addition to all those listed in the Acknowledgments of the new paper, I’m grateful to Matt Lamanna and Amy Henrici of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History for letting me play with study the Haplo specimens in their care. Mike and I also owe a huge thanks to the editorial team at the Journal of Paleontological Techniques. We reached out to them a few days ago to ask if it might be possible to get our in-press paper done and out in time for SV-POW!’s anniversary weekend, and they pitched in to make it happen.
What’s next? We weighed the evidence and formulated what the best solution we could think of. Now it’s up to the world to decide if that was a useful contribution. The comment thread is open — let’s find out.
3D printing is especially useful for sauropod workers
September 28, 2022
This is the first 3D print of a dinosaur bone that I ever had access to: the third caudal vertebra of MWC 8028, the ‘new’ Haplocanthosaurus specimen from Snowmass, Colorado (Foster and Wedel 2014, Wedel et al. 2021). I’ve been carrying this thing around since 2018. It’s been an aid to thought. I touched on this before, in this post, but real sauropod vertebrae are almost always a giant pain to work with, given their charming combination of great weight, fragility, and irreplaceability. As opposed to scaled 3D prints, which are light, tough, and endlessly replaceable.
This was brought home to me again a couple of weeks ago, when I visited the Carnegie Museum, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Research Casting International, in Trenton, Ontario, Canada. I was at each place to have another look at their haplocanthosaur specimens. The Carnegie is of course the home of CM 572, the type of H. priscus, and CM 879, the type of H. utterbacki (which has long been sunk into H. priscus, and rightly so — more on that another time, perhaps). RCI currently has CMNH 10380, the holotype of H. delfsi, for reprepping and remounting before it goes back to the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.
Caudals 1 through 6 of CM 572, the holotype of Haplocanthosaurus priscus.
The caudals of CM 572 and CM 879 aren’t that different in size — the centra max out at about 20cm (8in) in diameter, and the biggest, caudal 1 of CM 572, is 50cm (20in) tall. Still, given their weight and the number of thin projecting processes that could possibly break off, I handled them gingerly.
Caudals 1 through 5 of CM 10380, the holotype of Haplocanthosaurus delfsi.
The caudals of H. delfsi are a whole other kettle of fish. Caudal 1 has a max diameter of 36cm (14in) and a total height of 85cm (33.5in). I didn’t handle that one by myself unless I absolutely had to. Fortunately Garth Dallman of RCI helped a lot with the very literal heavy lifting, as did fellow researcher Brian Curtice, who was there at the same time I was.
Back to my beloved MWC 8028, the Snowmass haplocanthosaur. My colleagues and I are still working on it, and there will be more papers coming down the pike in due time (f’rinstance). I’m pretty sure that the main reason we’ve been able to get so much mileage out of this mostly incomplete and somewhat roadkilled specimen is that we’ve had 3D prints of key bones to play with. Now, I joke all the time about being a grownup who gets paid to play with dinosaur bones, but for once I’m not writing in jest when I say ‘play with’. That 3D printed caudal is basically a dinosaurian fidget toy for me, and I think it’s probably impossible to play with anatomical specimens without getting interested in their nooks and crannies and bits and bobs.
Another nice thing about it: I can throw it in my luggage, take it Oklahoma or Utah or Pennsylvania or Canada, and just plop it in someone’s hand and say, “Look at this weird thing. Have you ever seen that before?” I have done that, in all of those places, and it’s even more convenient and useful than showing CT slices on my laptop. I’ve watched my friends and colleagues run their fingers over the print, pinch its nearly non-existent centrum, poke at its weird neural canal, and really grokk its unusual morphology. And then we’ve had more productive conversations than we would have otherwise — they really Get It, because they’ve really handled it.
When I started writing this post, the title was a question, but that’s tentative to the point of being misleading. Three-D prints are obviously useful for sauropod workers because with very few exceptions our specimens are otherwise un-play-with-able. And playing with dinosaur bones turns out to be a pretty great way to make discoveries, and to share them.
(And yes, we’ll be publishing the CT scans and 3D models of MWC 8028 in due time, so you can play with it yourself.)
References
- Foster, J.R., and Wedel, M.J. 2014. Haplocanthosaurus (Saurischia: Sauropoda) from the lower Morrison Formation (Upper Jurassic) near Snowmass, Colorado. Volumina Jurassica 12(2): 197–210. DOI: 10.5604/17313708 .1130144
- Wedel, Mathew; Atterholt, Jessie; Dooley, Jr., Alton C.; Farooq, Saad; Macalino, Jeff; Nalley, Thierra K.; Wisser, Gary; and Yasmer, John. 2021. Expanded neural canals in the caudal vertebrae of a specimen of Haplocanthosaurus. Academia Letters, Article 911, 10pp. DOI: 10.20935/AL911
I am co-authoring a manuscript that, among other things, tries to trace the history of the molds made by the Carnegie Museum in the early 1900s, from which they cast numerous replica skeletons of the Diplodocus carnegii mount (CM 84, CM 94, CM 307 and other contributing specimens). This turns out to be quite a mystery, and I have become fascinated by it.
Below is the relevant section of the manuscript as it now stands. Can anyone out there shed any further light on the mystery?
So far as we have been able to determine, the casting of the concrete Diplodocus of Vernal was probably the last time the Carnegie Museum’s original molds were used. However, that was not Untermann’s intention. In his 1959 account, he wrote (p368–369):
Several museums in the United States and from lands as distant as Japan and Italy have expressed a desire to acquire the molds and cast a Diplodocus of their own from either plaster or some of the newer synthetics. To date no museum has apparently been able to make satisfactory arrangement for the acquisition of the molds and the casting of a skeleton. We still have the molds in Vernal, and any museum, anywhere, is welcome to them just for hauling them off. […] The Diplodocus on the lawn of the Utah Field House is the eleventh replica to be cast from the molds […] Does anyone wish to cast the twelfth?
From here, though, the story becomes contradictory. Sassaman (1988) reported that “the molds finally fell apart because of old age soon after it [the concrete Diplodocus] was made”. Similarly, Ilja Niewland (pers. comm., 2022) said that “The original moulds were thrown away somewhere during the 1960s (nobody at the [Carnegie Museum] could be more specific than that)”, suggesting that the molds may have been returned to their origin.
Both these accounts seem to be in error, as shown by a 1960 report in the Vernal Express newspaper (Anonymous 1960a; Figure H; see also Carr and Hansen 2005). This says that in the middle of July 1960, the molds were collected by the Rocky Mount Children’s Museum (now the Rocky Mount Imperial Center, Children’s Museum & Science Centre) in North Carolina, with the intention that they would be used to create a twelfth cast which would be mounted outside the museum building next to the Tar River in Rocky Mount’s Sunset Park. But was such a cast ever created? A sequence of reports in the Rocky Mount Evening Telegram from April to July 1960 (Williams 1960, Bell 1960a, Bell 1960b, Anonymous 1960b) enthusiastically announce and discuss the impeding arrival, and the later articles say that museum board president Harold Minges has left for Utah to collect to molds — but then the newspaper goes silent on the subject, and the project is never mentioned again. There is no positive evidence that the molds even arrived in Rocky Mount, far less that they were used to create a new mount. Thus newspaper reports from both Utah and North Carolina say that the molds set out on their journey from one to the other, but neither confirms that they ever arrived. On the other hand, there is also no report of the molds being lost or destroyed, so perhaps the most likely interpretation is that they arrived in Rocky Mount, but were found to be in worse condition than expected and quietly left in storage. This interpretation is supported by Rea (2001:210) who reported that “from Vernal the molds kept travelling — first, to the Rocky Mount Children’s Museum in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, although a cast was never made there”. Similarly, Moore (2014:234-235) stated that “From Vernal, Utah, [CM] molds of Diplodocus carnegii are shipped to Rocky Mount Children’s Museum in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. Because of the age-related damage to the molds, a cast was never prepared”.
Hurricane Floyd devastated Rocky Mount in 1999, with flooding from the River Tar destroying the original Children’s Museum along with all its exhibits and records (Leigh White, pers. comm., 2022), so no records survive that could confirm the molds’ arrival or any subsequent use. The museum was located next door to a municipal water treatment facility that also flooded and released unknown chemicals, so museum property that might have otherwise been salvageable in that area was deemed contaminated and required to be destroyed. If the molds were in storage at the Children’s Museum at this time, then this was likely the end of their story.
The Children’s Museum was re-established at the newly built Imperial Centre, where it still resides, but no trace exists there of molds or casts of Diplodocus. Corroborating the hypothesis that no cast ever existed, most staff who worked at the museum in the 1980s do not recall any such cast (Leigh White, pers. comm., 2022). Contradicting this, however, Jan Engle Hicks, Curator of Education at the Rocky Mount Children’s Museum from 1971–2002, has a memory of Diplodocus casts being on exhibit at the museum when she started work in 1971. She does not recall if they were still part of the museum collection in 1999 when the collection was destroyed.
Whether or not a cast was made at Rocky Mount, it is possible that this was not the end for the molds. Rea (2001:210) continues: “Eventually the molds found their way to the Houston Museum of Science, where they were used to fill in gaps in the Diplodocus hayi skeleton that had been swapped from Pittsburgh to Cleveland before ending up in Houston”, citing a personal communication from John S. McIntosh. (The skeleton in question is that of CM 662, which became CMNH 10670 in Cleveland, then HMNS 175 in Houston. Having been nominated as the holotype of the new species Diplodocus hayi by Holland (1924:399), the species was later moved to its own new genus Galeamopus by Tschopp et al. (2015:267).)
Due to the loss of the Rocky Mount Children’s Museum records, we cannot tell whether they ever shipped the molds to Houston; and we have not been able to obtain information from the Houston Museum. Brian Curtice (pers. comm., 2022) reports that he was in Houston in 1995 and did not see the molds in the collection, nor hear of their ever having been there. In the absence of evidence that the molds ever made it to Houston, it seems at least equally likely that the missing bones in HMNS 175 were cast and supplied by Dinolab, using the second-generation molds described blow, and that Rea (2001) misreported this.
As recently as 1988, Rolfe (1988) wrote on behalf of the Royal Museum of Scotland, “At present I am exploring the possibility of re-using the Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh moulds, although there is considerable doubt about whether they are up to the job, after so much previous use”. Sadly, his letter does not mention their then-current whereabouts.
In an unpublished manuscript, Madsen (1990:4) wrote that “The fate of the initial set of molds is somewhat in question, but Wann Langston (personal communication, 1989) suggests that they seem to have been lost, strayed, or stolen during transport from ? to ?. Principles contacted in regards to the disposition of the molds could not provide specific information.”. Infuriatingly, the question marks are in the original. Since both Langston and Madsen are now deceased, there is no way to discover on which of the molds’ journeys Langston thought they were lost or destroyed. It is unlikely, at least, that Langston had in mind the their initial journey from Vernal to Rocky Mount. Kirby (1998:4) wrote that “Somewhere along the line, as the story goes, the molds received from the Carnegie had been shipped to a school down south and never arrived. So they were lost”. Since Rocky mount is about 2000 miles east (not south) of Vernal, “a school down south” could not have referred, in a Utah publication, to a museum out east. The Houston museum also does not seems an especially likely candidate for this designation, being 1300 miles southeast of Vernal.
Putting it all together, there is no way that all the reports cited here can be accurate. Perhaps the most likely scenario is this: the molds were successfully shipped to Rocky Mount in July 1960 (Anonymous 1960a, Anonymous 1960b) but found to be unusable (Rea 2001:210, Moore 2014:234-235) and left in storage. At some later point there were shipped to a school in a southern state (Kirby 1998:4) but did not arrive (Langston cited in Madsen 1990:4). This may have happened in late 1988 or early 1989, between Rolfe’s (1988) letter that expressed an interest in using the molds and Langston’s personal communication to Madsen in 1989. Where the molds are now, and why they did not arrive, we can only speculate. As Madsen (1990:4) concluded, “It is truly a mystery that an estimated 3–6 tons of plaster molds could simply vanish!”
References
Anonymous. 1960a. Dinosaur molds take long ride to No. Carolina children’s home. Vernal Express, 14 July 1960, page 15. https://newspapers.lib.utah.edu/ark:/87278/s6zk6w6s/21338221
Anonymous. 1960b. Something ‘big’ for a fact. Rocky Mount Evening Telegram, 8 July 1960, page 4A. https://newspaperarchive.com/rocky-mount-evening-telegram-jul-08-1960-p-4/
Bell, Mae. 1960a. Dinosaur’s coming here brings questions galore. Rocky Mount Evening Telegram, 14 May 1960, page 2. https://newspaperarchive.com/rocky-mount-evening-telegram-may-14-1960-p-2/
Bell, Mae. 1960b. ‘Dinosaur’ soon to arrive here. Rocky Mount Evening Telegram, 3 July 1960, page 3A. https://newspaperarchive.com/rocky-mount-evening-telegram-jul-08-1960-p-8/
Carr, Elaine, and Aric Hansen. 2005. William Randolf Turnage, Dee Hall, and Ernest Untermann [archive photograph with metadata]. University of Utah, J. Willard Marriott Digital Library, image 1086142. https://collections.lib.utah.edu/details?id=1086142
Holland, William J. 1924. The skull of Diplodocus. Memoirs of the Carnegie Museum 9(3):379–403.
Kirby, Robert. 1998. Danny and the dinosaurs. Chamber Spirit (newsletter of the Vernal area Chamber of Commerce) 3(4):1–6.
Madsen, James H. 1990. Diplodocus carnegiei: Production and design of replica skeletons. Unpublished draft manuscript. (No author is named in the manuscript, but Madsen’s son Chris believes it is his work.)
Moore, Randy. 2014. Dinosaurs by the Decades: A Chronology of the Dinosaur in Science and Popular Culture. Greenwood, Westport, Connecticut.
Rea, Tom. 2001. Bone Wars: The Excavation and Celebrity of Andrew Carnegie’s Dinosaur. University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA.
Rolfe, William D. I. 1988. Untitled letter to LuRae Caldwell (Utah Field House). 24 October 1988.
Sassaman, Richard. 1988. Carnegie had a dinosaur too. American Heritage 39(2):72–73.
Tschopp, Emanuel, Octávio Mateus and Roger B. J. Benson. 2015. A specimen-level phylogenetic analysis and taxonomic revision of Diplodocidae (Dinosauria, Sauropoda). PeerJ 2:e857. doi:10.7717/peerj.857
Untermann, G. Ernest. 1959. A replica of Diplodocus. Curator 2(4):364–369. doi:10.1111/j.2151-6952.1959.tb00520.x
Williams, Oliver. Pre-historic dinosaur to tower over city; giant animal four times taller than man. Rocky Mount Evening Telegram, 24 April 1960, page 3B. https://newspaperarchive.com/rocky-mount-evening-telegram-apr-24-1960-p-11/
I’ve been in contact recently with Matt Lamanna, Associate Curator in the Section of Vertebrate Paleontology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History — which is obviously the best job in the world. Among a batch of photos that he sent me recently, I seized on this gem:
Tyrannosaurus rex, Diplodocus carnegii, Apatosaurus louisae and multiple mostly juvenile individuals of Homo sapiens. Photograph taken between 1941 and 1965. Courtesy of Carnegie Museum of Natural History.
There’s so much to appreciate in this picture: the hunchbacked, tail-dragging Tyrannosaurus; the camarasaur-style skull on the Apatosaurus; the hard-to-pin-down archaic air of Diplodocus.
But the thing I love about it is the 1950s kids. (Or, to be fair, maybe the 1940s kids or early 1960s kids, but you get the point.) They way they’ve all been asked to look up at the tyrannosaur skull, and are obediently doing it. How earnest they all appear. How they’re all dressed as tiny adults. How self-consciously some of them have posed themselves — the thoughtful kid one in from the left, his foot up on the plinth and his chin resting on his hand; the cool kid to his right, arms crossed, interested but careful not to seem too impressed.
Where are these kids now? Assuming it was taken in 1953, the midpoint of the possible range, and assuming they’re about 12 years old in this photo, they were born around 1941, which would make them 81 now. Statistically, somewhere around half of them are still alive. I wonder how many of them remember this day, and the strange blend of awe, fascination, and self-consciousness.
This is a time-capsule, friends. Enjoy it.
Apatosaurus louisae from below
May 3, 2022
We’ve shown you the Apatosaurus louisae holotype mounted skeleton CM 3018 several times: shot from the hip, posing with another massive vertebrate, photographed from above, and more. Today we bring you a world first: Apatosaurus from below. Scroll and enjoy!
Obviously there’s a lot of perspective distortion here. You have to imagine yourself lying underneath the skeleton and looking up — as I was, when I took the short video that was converted into this image.
Many thanks to special-effects wizard Jarrod Davis for stitching the video into the glorious image you see here.
The most obvious effect of the perspective distortion is that the neck and tail both look tiny: we are effectively looking along them, the neck in posteroventral view and the tail in anteroventral. The ribs are also flared in this perspective, making Apato look even broader than it is in real life. Which is pretty broad. One odd effect of this is that this makes the scapulae look as though they are sitting on top of the ribcage rather than appressed to its sides.
Apatosaurus louisae: shooting from the hip
April 30, 2022
Here at SV-POW! Towers, we like to show you iconic mounted skeletons from unusual perspectives. Here’s one:
Apatosaurus louisae holotype CM 3018, mounted skeleton in the public gallery of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History: head, neck, torso and hip in right posterolateral view. Photograph by Matt Wedel, 12th March 2019 (my birthday!)
Oh, man, I love that museum. And I love that specimen. And I love the one that’s standing next to it (Diplodocus CM 82, natch.) I’ve got to find a way to get myself back out there.
That’s all: just enjoy.
Walking around the mounted skeleton of Apatosaurus louisae
March 22, 2019
In case you haven’t gotten to do this, or need a refresher, or just want a little more Apatosaurus in your life. And honestly, who doesn’t? As with the previous Diplodocus walk-around, there’s no narration, just whatever ambient sound reached the mic. Go have fun.
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 