Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

The Sunday after SVP, Brian Engh and I visited the museum in Albuquerque. I was quite taken with the mounted T. rex. It’s waaaay more interesting and dynamic than any other T. rex mount I’ve seen. It even beats the “Rockette rex” in Denver (which I really like and need to blog about), by virtue of putting the body and head down at eye level where you can study them up close.

The only thing I don’t like about this mount is that it has the dumb teeth-hanging-out-too-far thing going on. Why the heck people don’t fix that, I have no idea. Like, even if that’s the way the jaws are molded, cut off the excess and glue the crowns back up where they belong. Or fix the friggin’ mold. It’s not like the problem hasn’t been obvious for decades.

On the upside, pretty much everything else about this mount is awesome. Brian and I spent a fair amount of time working through the muscle attachments and thinking about how bulky the animal would have been in life. The answer is “very”.

Pretty cool to think that a fleshier, more aggro version of this was the last thing that many animals ever saw. And by ‘cool’ I mean ‘terrifying’.