Museum of Osteology, June 2018 visit
December 13, 2018
Click to embiggen. Trust me.
Last year about this time I wrote:
Here’s a stupid thing: roughly 2-3 times a year I go to the field or to a museum and get hundreds of SV-POW!-able photos. Then I get back to the world and catch up on all of the work that piled up while I was away. And by the time I’m done with that, whatever motivating spark I had – to get some of those photos posted and talk about the exciting things I figured out – has dissipated.
The museum I was thinking about more than any other when I wrote that is the Museum of Osteology in Oklahoma City. I don’t get there every year, but I stop in as often as possible, and I make it more years than not. And yet, looking back through the archives I see that almost all of my posts about the Museum of Osteology came in a brief flurry five years ago. Shameful!
This summer I was out in the Oklahoma panhandle for fieldwork with Anne Weil, then I had a very quick day in the collections at the OMNH in Norman, then I had to drop my son London with relatives (he stayed for an extra week) and hop a plane home. In between the kid hand-off and the drop-dead get-to-the-airport time I had exactly one spare hour, so of course I hit the museum.
UPDATE: for the curious, here’s the signage for the hanging humpback whale skeleton.
The Museum of Osteology is easily one of my favorite natural history museums in the world. Like all my favorite museums, it just packed to the gills with actual natural history objects. The signage is tasteful, informative, and discreet, and there is a blessed absence of blaring videos, rotating 3D whatsits, and interactive geegaws to ruin the experience.* You can walk all the way around the big mounted skeletons with no glass in the way. The staff are friendly and helpful, and as you can see from the photos, they even provide comfortable benches for people who wish to sit and ponder the endless forms most beautiful.
That, folks, is a damn fine museum.
* To be clear, I don’t think all videos and interactive displays are evil. But they need to enhance the experience of natural history, not be a substitute for it, and that’s a distinction that seems lost on many exhibit designers.
I was taken by this conjunction of two water-adapted artiodactyls.
Here’s the hippo by itself if you want the whole skeleton.
And a rhino to round out the big African megafauna. I showed the giraffe in this old post.
Even familiar animals that you may think you know front-to-back are often presented in new and interesting ways. I adore this horse skull, which has the maxilla and mandible dissected to show the very tall, ever-growing teeth, which erupt continuously through the horse’s life until the crowns are entirely worn away.
The textures on this giraffe skull are pretty mind-blowing.
I strongly recommend zooming in and tracing out some blood vessel pathways, especially over the orbit, at the bases of the ossicones, and in the temporal fossa (below the ossicones and behind the orbit).
Bottom line, if you are interested in the natural world at all, you owe it to yourself to visit this museum. And you’ll want to go as heavy in the wallet as you can manage, because the gift shop is ridiculous and can easily eat 30-45 minutes and all your disposable income. Take it from a survivor.
The camarasaur that was more than it seeemed
July 21, 2018
This is SUSA 515, a partial skeleton of Camarasaurus on display in the Museum of Moab. (SUSA stands for Southeastern Utah Society of Arts & Sciences.) It was described by John Foster in 2005.
I like this thing. The neural spines are blown off so you can see right down into the big pneumatic cavities in the dorsal vertebrae. And unlike the plastered, painted, and retouched-to-seeming-perfection mounted skeletons in most museums, this specimen reflects how most sauropod specimens look when they come out of the ground. With a few dorsal centra, a roadkilled sacrum, and some surprisingly interesting caudals, it puts me strongly in mind of MWC 8028, the Snowmass Haplocanthosaurus (another John Foster joint: see Foster and Wedel 2014).
Frankly, it doesn’t look like much: 17 centra and some odd bits of pelvis. Surely, with so many good Camarasaurus specimens in the world, this one couldn’t possibly have anything new to tell us about the anatomy of that genus. And yet, it has a couple of unusual features that make it worthy of attention. My colleagues and I are working on those things right now, and you’ll be hearing more about this specimen in the very near future.
References
- Foster, J.R. 2005. New sauropod dinosaur specimens found near Moab, Utah, and the sauropod fauna of the Morrison Formation. Canyon Legacy: Journal of the Dan O’Laurie Museum of Moab 55:22-27.
- 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
Lots of museums have some version of this, but this is the nicest one I’ve seen myself.
Just back from the field. Will post photos soon. Putting this up to meet the weekly posting requirement.
Exploded turtle skulls are cool, but what about exploding the entire turtle? (Not that way.) Folks at the Naturhistorisches Museum Wien roll hard. Or did – I assume these exhibits are old. Thankfully no museum studies doofus has insisted they be taken down and replaced with an interactive 3D display on what it feels like to be a sea turtle. Kudos to the current management for keeping the natural history museum filled with natural history.
I didn’t get back far enough from them to photograph all of the labels, mostly because I had like 90 minutes to jet through roughly 13,792 halls of amazing things. But this one is a loggerhead, Caretta caretta. Identifying the others is left as an exercise for the reader.
Or better yet, make your own, if you can procure a dead turtle.
Aepyornis femora of the Oxford Museum of Natural History
March 18, 2018
By contrast to the very delicate pelican humerus and ulna in the previous post, here is the left femur of Aepyornis OUMNH 4950 — an “elephant bird” from Antolanbiby, Madagascar. It’s just a couple of meters away from the pelican, in the same Oxford gallery:
This is of course a ludicrously robust bone, as befits a gigantic ground-dwelling bird. But the fun thing is that it, too, is very pneumatic. You can see this in lots of ways: the foramina up at the top, the little patch of stretched texture at mid-length, and most of all in the honeycomb structure of the inside of the bone, which we can see where the cortex has broken off at both proximal and distal ends.
Birds: they’re made of air.
Here are the humerus and ulna of a pelican, bisected:
What we’re seeing here is the top third of each bone: humerus halves on the left, ulna halves on the right, in a photo taken at the 2012 SVPCA in one of our favourite museums.
The hot news here is of course the extreme pneumaticity: the very thin bone walls, reinforced only at the proximal extremely by thin struts. Here’s the middle third, where as you can see there is essentially no reinforcement: just a hollow tube, that’s all:
And then at the distal ends, we see the struts return:
Here’s the whole thing in a single photo, though unfortunately marred by a reflection (and obviously at much lower resolution):
We’ve mentioned before that pelicans are crazy pneumatic, even by the standards of other birds: as Matt said about a pelican vertebra (skip to 58 seconds in the linked video), “the neural spine is sort of a fiction, almost like a tent of bone propped up”.
Honestly. Pelican skeletons hardly even exist.
A quick stop at the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History
December 21, 2016
I’m back in Oklahoma for the holidays, and anytime I’m near Norman I pop in to the OMNH to see old friends, both living and fossil. Here’s the Aquilops display in the hall of ancient life, which has been up for a while now. I got some pictures of it when I was here back in March, just never got around to posting them.
Aquilops close up. You can’t see it well in this pic, but on the upper right is a cast of the Aquilops cranium with a prosthesis that shows what the missing bits would have looked like. That prosthesis was sculpted by – who else? – Kyle Davies, the OMNH head preparator and general sculpting/molding/casting sorceror. You’ve seen his work on the baby apatosaur in this post. I have casts of everything shown here – original fossil, fossil-plus-prosthesis, and reconstructed 3D skull – and I should post on them. Something to do in the new year.
The Aquilops display is set just opposite the Antlers Formation exhibit, which has a family of Tenontosaurus being menaced by two Deinonychus, and at the transition between Early and Late Cretaceous. The one mount in the Late Cretaceous area is the big Pentaceratops, which is one of the best things in this or any museum.
Evidence in support of that assertion. Standing directly in front of this monster is a breathtaking experience, which I highly recommend to everyone.
It’s just perfect that you can see the smallest and earliest (at least for now) North American ceratopsian adjacent to one of the largest and latest. Evolution, baby!
I didn’t only look at dinosaurs – the life-size bronze mammoth in the south rotunda is always worth a visit, especially in holiday regalia.
No holiday post about the OMNH would be complete without a shot of “Santaposeidon” (previously seen here). I will never get tired of this!
The chances that I’ll get anything else posted in 2016 hover near zero, so I hope you all have a safe and happy holiday season and a wonderful New Year.
How horrifying was the neck of Barosaurus?
September 16, 2016
Suppose that I and Matt were right in our SVPCA talk this year, and the
“Supersaurus” cervical BYU 9024 really is the C9 of a gigantic Barosaurus. As we noted in our abstract, its total length of 1370 mm is exactly twice that of the C9 in AMNH 6341, which suggests its neck was twice as long over all — not 8.5 m but 17 m.
How horrifying is that?
I realised one good way to picture it is next to the entire mounted skeleton of Giraffatitan at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin. That skeleton is 13.27 m tall. At 17 m, the giant barosaur neck would be 28% longer than the total height of Giraffatitan.
Giraffatitan brancai mounted skeleton MB.R.2181 at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, with neck of Barosaurus ?lentus BYU 9024 at the same scale. Photo by Axel Mauruszat, from Wikipedia; drawing from Scott Hartman’s Supersaurus skeleton reconstruction.
Yes, this looks ridiculous. But it’s what the numbers tell us. Measure the skeleton’s height and the neck length off the image yourself if you don’t believe me.
(Note, too, that the size of the C9 in that big neck is about right, compared with a previous scaled image that Matt prepared, showing the “Supersaurus” vertebra in isolation alongside the Chicago Brachiosaurus.)
When evolution just gives up, part 4
May 16, 2016
Go home Eremotherium laurillardi, you are drunk.
When evolution just gives up, part 3
May 14, 2016
Seriously, Megatherium americanum, do you even lift?
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 