As regular readers will know, Matt and I have recently spent ten glorious days travelling the dinosaur museums of Utah, in a once-in-a-lifetime event that we have been calling the Sauropocalypse. In that time, we visited seven different museums and — this is the truth — had an absolutely fantastic time in all of them. One of the big reasons is of course the quality of their collections and galleries. But equally important is the welcome we got from our hosts at each of these places, and the help they all generously and cheerfully gave us.

Here’s where we visited, in chronological order, with a word of thanks to each host.

1. BYU Museum of Paleontology, Provo

Mike compares Jensen’s sculpture of the big Supersaurus cervical BYU 9024 with the actual fossil.

At the amazing BYU — where we spent three full days, as it has almost certainly the largest collection of sauropod fossils anywhere in the world — our host was Brooks Britt. (Matt’s mentioned Brooks previously on this blog, as one of the most formative influences on his career: the person who put him onto pneumaticity.)

Brooks set us free in his collections and gallery with no restrictions. He had specimens fork-lifted down from high shelves for us, gave us a pallet lifter so we could move them around at will, and generally did everything he could to make our stay productive. He also took us out to lunch, twice: once at a cheap but delicious taco place, and once at a Brazilian eat-all-you-want barbecue place where I could happily have spent the entire afternoon.

2. The Prehistoric Museum, Price

Matt inspects the beautifully preserved and prepared anterior cervicals of a Camarasaurus in the main gallery.

Our host at Price was occasional SV-POW! commenter Ken Carpenter, who also arranged for us to give a pair of talks at the museum in the evening. (Mine: Why giraffes have short necks. Matt’s: Why elephants are so small.) Ken gave us free reign to get in among the exhibits, and we took full advantage to make a potentially important discovery (to be discussed in a future post).

Ken also took us to see the CEUM collections, and invited us to take on a huge descriptive project, working on the PR2 brachiosaur. Sadly, that project is just too big for either of us. But there are individual elements within the PR2 collection that are of interest, and no doubt we’ll be posting more about those, too.

3. Dinosaur National Monument, Jensen

Matt looms ominously over an Apatosaurus cervical in ventral view — or is it Camarasaurus?

Matt has already paid tribute to Dan Chure, our host up on the wall, who came in on his day off just to help us. An extraordinary host at an astonishing venue.

4. Utah Field House of Natural History, Vernal

Diplodocus butt. Wedel for scale. He likes big butts and he cannot lie.

Here, we were hosted by Mary Beth Bottomley. She went beyond the call of duty in not only allowing us access to the prep room and collections, but helping us to take apart the shelving in collections so we could get better photos of a big, difficult-to-move specimen. Mary Beth was particularly interested in what we were working on, and will (I hope) now be a regular reader of this blog.

5. Dinosaur Journey, Fruita

Mike, astonished by a particularly extreme apatosaur cervical. But then aren’t they all extreme?

We were, inadvertently, sensationally rude to our host, Julia McHugh. She’d arranged to take us for lunch, but Matt was so obsessed with the transit of Mercury across the sun that he completely forgot, and sent me off to get salads from Subway instead. (Note that I am making the point here that Matt forgot this arrangement. I make no comment on my own recall.) As a result, we cheated ourselves out of a BBQ lunch.

But Julia was great about it, and once again we were given free reign in collections. Matt and I were each able to make valuable observations, one for an already-in-progress paper and one for a new one.

6. Natural History Museum of Utah, Salt Lake City

Barosaurus, an Allosaurus adult and several juveniles, and Mike.

Here, our host was Carrie Levitt. She welcomed us to the museum, gave us a tour of collections, left us to it, and … we spent almost the entire day in the public gallery instead! I did get a couple of nice photos of the holotype skulls of Kosmoceratops and Diabloceratops, but the truth is that the public gallery was so awesome, it just sucked us in.

But Carrie was great about it. Rather than resenting our having wasted her time in the collections orientation, she was just glad that we got useful observations out of the museum. (And we did. Matt and I can sometimes get so wrapped up in individual vertebrae that we forget they’re part of whole animals. The many fine mounted dinosaur skeletons at UMNH helped to redress this failing.)

7. North American Museum of Ancient Life, Thanksgiving Point

Matt is attacked by a Utahraptor, but is all like “Am I bovvered?”. To be honest, I suspect he was all dinosaured out by this point.

On our last day — I had to be at the airport by 6pm — we went to NAMAL, We’d not been able to make contact with staff ahead of time, as Matt’s old contact seems to be no longer at the museum. But as we walked past the prep lab near the museum entrance, we saw some beautiful Barosaurus cervicals. As we stood gawping, Rick Hunter, inside the lab, recognised Matt and invited us in.

With no prior notice at all, Rick dropped what he was doing to help us out as we inspected their gorgeous material. That’s been really helpful as we’ve firmed up our ideas on what Barosaurus is. (And I hope we’ve helped them get a better handle on the serial positions of their vertebrae, too.)

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In summary, pretty much everyone we met in Utah was super-helpful and super-nice. That also includes John and ReBecca Foster, who put us up for the night in Moab, the night before we went to Arches National Park. The people are one of three reasons why Utah is now my favourite US state. (The others are the sauropods, naturally, and the landscapes.)

Museum folks of Utah, we salute you!