How the Concrete Diplodocus paper came to be
February 23, 2023
Last time, I told you about my new paper, The Concrete Diplodocus of Vernal (Taylor et al. 2023), and finished up by saying this: “But Mike, you ask — how did you, a scientist, find yourself writing a history paper? It’s a good question, and one with a complicated answer. Tune in next time to find out!”
Paper 1
The truth is, I never set out to write a history paper. My goal was very different: to belatedly write up my and Matt’s 2016 SVPCA presentation, How Big Did Barosaurus Get? (Taylor and Wedel 2016). In that talk, we discussed a half-prepared jacket at BYU that contains three Barosaurus cervicals which are significantly larger than those of the well-known specimen AMNH 6341. And we went on to note that the giant “Supersaurus” cervical BYU 9024 is morphologically indistinguishable from those of Barosaurus, even though it’s going on for twice the size.
That paper (codename: superbaro) is in progress, and I would estimate it’s about 40% done. But in that paper, I needed to write a brief section in the introduction about AMNH 6341, the keystone specimen for Barosaurus, from which all our perceptions of that animal derive. And it turned out that in that section I had a lot to say, to the point where …
Paper 2
It became apparent that this section needed to be pulled out and become its own paper on the AMNH Barosaurus. As I worked on this, trying to get to the bottom of the complicated history of the mounted cast in the museum’s atrium, I got a lot of help from Peter May of Research Casting International, and from AMNH alumni Lowell Dingus and Gene Gaffney, to the point where they have all been added as authors to the ongoing manuscript.
That paper (codename: baromount) is in progress, and I would estimate it’s about 80-90% done. But in that paper, I needed to write a section on the sources of the various elements that make up the cast — they are not all from AMNH 6341, which is pretty complete as sauropods go but still has a lot of gaps. It turned out, after some poking about, that significant parts of the skeleton were Diplodocus casts, and that they had been made from molds taken from a concrete cast in Vernal, Utah. I started to write up the background information on this, but quickly realised that there was a lot to say, and that it needed to be extracted out into its own paper.
Paper 3
Taylor et al (2023:figure 4). Assembly of the outdoor concrete Diplodocus at the Utah Field House in 1957. (A) In right posterolateral view. The sacrum and fused ilia having been mounted on the main support to begin the process, the hind limbs, last four dorsal vertebrae and first caudal vertebra have now been added. (B) In left anterodorsolateral view, probably taken from the roof of the museum. The mount is almost complete, with only the forelimbs, their girdles and the dorsal ribs yet to be attached. Note that, contra Untermann (1959, p. 367–368), the skull is already in place. Both images scanned by Aric Hansen for the J. Willard Marriott Digital Library, image IDs 1090660 and 1090647. Used by permission, Uintah County Library Regional History Center.
That paper, of course, became The Concrete Diplodocus of Vernal. As I was working on it, I found myself constantly consulting park manager Steve Sroka, and quickly realised that the manuscript had reached the stage of being co-authored. Later in the process, significant contributions from Ken Carpenter went beyond the point of pers. comms, and he was added as a third author. (This paper also received a lot of help from other people, and the acknowledgements are correspondingly extensive and effusive.)
So that is the origin story of yesterday’s paper. But there is another chapter in this story …
Paper 4
As I was writing the section of this paper about the original Carnegie Diplodocus, and in particular about the composition of the mounted skeleton from which the original molds were (mostly) made, it became apparent that this, too, was a long and complicated story. And even though that story has been told in detail multiple times (most notably by Nieuwland 2019), there was still plenty to be told. So this section needed to be pulled out of the CDoV paper (where only a brief summary remains) and become its own paper.
That paper (codename: carnegie) is in progress, and I would estimate it’s about 90-95% done. It, too, has acquired co-authors, including Ilja Nieuwland himself and three Carnegie staff members, but cannot be completed yet as I await an important contribution from an indisposed co-author. Still, it should not be too long before that one is submitted — to be followed by baromount, and then finally superbaro.
So what’s happened here is that a perfectly innocent morphological description paper, based on a conference abstract and a 15-minute talk, has mutated into four substantial papers (of which, admittedly, only one is published so far).
The moral of this story
One moral is that I evidently have very little idea what I am going to work on at any given point in my career. As I was putting together the sidebar page on the Concrete Diplodocus paper, I stumbled across another sidebar page titled Mike’s open projects, which I made in 2020. It lists eight projects that I was going to work on. Of those, one (What do we mean by “cranial” and “caudal” on a vertebra?, Taylor and Wedel 2022) is complete; one (the superbaro project) has advanced but been interrupted by its three offspring papers; and the other six have pretty much not advanced at all (though I do still plan to do them all). Meanwhile, I have done a ton of work on projects that weren’t even on my radar back then, including pneumatic variation (Taylor and Wedel 2021) and finally putting a stake through the heart of neck incompleteness (Taylor 2022).
That’s the bad moral. But there is also a good moral. This is a nice example of what Matt wrote about way back in 2011, for Tutorial 12: How to find problems to work on. Once you actually get started working on something — anything — it will tend to sprout buds. And those buds can easily — too easily, sometimes — become new projects of their own. There is no such thing as a linear programme of research, at least not in my experience. Just an endlessly ramifying tree of fascinating areas that beg to be worked on.
References
- Nieuwland, Ilja. 2019. American dinosaur abroad: a cultural history of Carnegie’s plaster Diplodocus. University of Pittsburgh Press. ISBN: 978-0822945574. doi:10.2307/j.ctvh4zh5n
- Taylor, Michael P., and Mathew J. Wedel. 2016. How big did Barosaurus get?. p. 30 in Anonymous (ed.), SVPCA and SPPC 2016 Liverpool Abstract Book. 49 pp.
- Taylor, Michael P., and Wedel, Mathew J. 2022. What do we mean by the directions “cranial” and “caudal” on a vertebra? Journal of Paleontological Techniques 25:1-24.
- Taylor, Michael P., Steven D. Sroka and Kenneth Carpenter. 2023. The Concrete Diplodocus of Vernal — a Cultural Icon of Utah. Geology of the Intermountain West 10:65-91. doi:10.31711/giw.v10.pp65-91
… and I’m guessing that if you read this blog, you like at least one of these things.
Today sees the publication of a paper that I’m particularly pleased with, partly because it’s so far outside my usual area: The Concrete Diplodocus of Vernal — a Cultural Icon of Utah (Taylor et al. 2023). Let’s jump in by taking a look at the eponymous concrete Diplodocus:
Taylor et al. (2023:figure 5). The completed outdoor Diplodocus mount in a rare color photograph. Undated (but between 1957 and 1989). Scanned by Eileen Carr for the J. Willard Marriot Digital Library, image ID 415530. Used by permission, Uintah County Library Regional History Center.
(On of the things I love about this photo is that it has the same 1950s energy as the Carnegie Tyrannosaurus mount that I posted a while back.)
This paper tells the neglected story of how the Utah Field House museum in Vernal acquired the original Carnegie Diplodocus molds in 1957, after they had languished, unloved and overlooked, in their Pittsburgh basement for forty years; how they were used to cast a Diplodocus from actual concrete (one part cement to three parts aragonite, for those who care); how the molds then went on a series of adventures, never actually yielding another complete skeleton, before being lost or destroyed; how the concrete cast stood for 30 years before the harsh Utah weather degraded it past the point of safety; how it was then used to make a fresh set of molds, and replaced by a new lightweight cast taken from those molds; and how the molds were then used to create a new generation of Diplodocus casts.
It’s a long and fascinating story with lots of twists and turns that I necessarily omitted from that summary — which is why it runs to 27 pages in the lavishly illustrated PDF. I urge you to go and read it for yourself: we wrote it to be an engaging story, and I hope it’s a pretty easy read. (My wife found it interesting, and she once literally fell asleep while I was running a talk to solicit her feedback, so that’s really something.)
Taylor et al. (2023:figure 3). Field House Museum director G. Ernest Untermann (left), and his wife, Staff Scientist Billie Untermann (right), grouting the cast dorsal vertebrae of the Field House’s concrete Diplodocus. 24 January 1957. Scanned by Aric Hansen for the J. Willard Marriot Digital Library, image ID 1086940. Used by permission, Uintah County Library Regional History Center.
This paper was submitted on 2 November 2022, so it’s taken less than five months to go through peer review, editorial processes, typesetting with four(!) rounds of page proofs and online publication. This of course is how it should always be — it’s a bit stupid that I am drawing attention to this schedule like it’s something extraordinary, but the truth is that it is extraordinary. At any rate that makes it fifteen times faster than my long-delayed (mostly my fault) paper on neck incompleteness (Taylor 2022).
I got so deeply into this paper when I was lead-authoring it that the phrase “the Concrete Diplodocus of Vernal” really started to echo around in my head. That is why the paper ends by expressing this wish:
Our dearest hope for this paper is that it inspires someone to create a Dungeons and Dragons module in which the Concrete Diplodocus of Vernal is a quest artifact with magical powers.
But Mike, you ask — how did you, a scientist, find yourself writing a history paper? It’s a good question, and one with a complicated answer. Tune in next time to find out!
References
- Taylor, Michael P., Steven D. Sroka and Kenneth Carpenter. 2023. The Concrete Diplodocus of Vernal — a Cultural Icon of Utah. Geology of the Intermountain West 10:65-91. doi:10.31711/giw.v10.pp65-91
- Taylor, Michael P. 2022. Almost all known sauropod necks are incomplete and distorted. PeerJ 10:e12810. doi:10.7717/peerj.12810
Roadside dinos of Yermo, California
April 27, 2015
A couple of weekends ago, London and I went camping and stargazing at Afton Canyon, a nice dark spot about 40 miles east of Barstow. On the way home, we took the exit off I-15 at Ghost Town Road, initially because we wanted to visit the old Calico Ghost Town. But then we saw big metal dinosaurs south of the highway, and that’s how we came to Peggy Sue’s Diner and in particular the Diner-saur Park.
The Diner-saur Park is out behind the diner and admission is free. There are pools with red-eared sliders, paved walkways, grass, trees, a small gift shop, and dinosaurs. Here’s a Spinosaurus – curiously popular in the Mojave Desert, those spinosaurs.
Ornithischians are represented by two stegosaurs, this big metal one and a smaller concrete one under a tree.
The turtles are entertaining. They paddle around placidly and crawl out to bask on the banks of the pools, and on little islands in the centers.
The gift shop is tiny and the selection of paleo paraphernalia is not going to blow away any hard-core dinophiles. But it is not without its charm. And, hey, when you find a dinosaur gift shop in the middle of nowhere, you don’t quibble about size. London got some little plastic turtles and I got some cheap and horribly inaccurate plastic dinosaur skeletons to make a NecroDinoMechaLaser Squad for our Dinosaur Island D&D campaign.
Now, about that sauropod. The identification sign on the side of the gift shop notwithstanding, this is not a Brachiosaurus. With the short forelimbs and big back end, this is clearly a diplodocid. The neck is too skinny for Apatosaurus or the newly-resurrected Brontosaurus, and too long for Diplodocus. I lean toward Barosaurus, although I noticed in going back through these photos that with the mostly-straight, roughly-45-degree-angle neck, it is doing a good impression of the Supersaurus from my 2012 dinosaur nerve paper. Compare this:
to this:
If I had noticed it sooner, I would have maneuvered for a better, more comparable shot.
Guess I’ll just have to go back.
Reference
Roadside reptiles of Gila Bend, Arizona
January 17, 2014
Well, I see that our ‘roadside dinos‘ category is in a sad state. Not from lack of posts, but because most of the so-called roadside dinos found therein are entirely too polished. Real roadside dinos are assembled by non-paleontologists armed only with scrap metal, welding equipment, The Giant Golden Book of Dinosaurs (again, the real one), and a dream. Take this beauty, which stands proudly outside of a gas station in the little ol’ town of Gila Bend, Arizona. It’s covered in graffiti and you can see through the gaps in its metal hide–right into the acetylene-powered heart of roadside Americana.
Plus, it has its neck in the right place. Who could pass that up?
It shares space with this somewhat less convincing rattlesnake. I note that the snake is leaning away from the road, and the kink in its spine is at about bumper-height. In situations like these, one can only say a silent thank-you that whatever poor drunk fool did this at least had the good taste to miss the sauropod.
If you make it to Gila Bend, you’ll be roughly half a time zone away from everywhere else, so you’ll probably be hungry. After you gas up, look for this sign:
next to this restaurant:
where you can sit at this table (maybe):
and eat some freakin’ awesome pancakes while revelling in the glories of the Space Race. Or, you know, a burger or something. We hit the Space Age Restaurant twice on our trip to Tucson last November, once each way, and it was excellent both times. There’s even a gift shop, says so right on the sign.
You’re welcome!
Night at the Museum: LACM’s Camp Dino
April 8, 2013
Last night London and I spent the night in the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (LACM), as part of the Camp Dino overnight adventure. So we got lots of time to roam the exhibit halls when they were–very atypically–almost empty. Above are the museum’s mounted Triceratops–or one of them, anyway–and mounted cast of the Mamenchisaurus hochuanensis holotype, presented in glorious not-stygian-darkness (if you went through the old dino hall, pre-renovation, you know what I mean).
We got there early and had time to roam around the museum grounds in Exposition Park. The darned-near-life-size bronze dinos out front are a minor LA landmark.
The rose garden was already closed, but we walked by anyway, and caught this rainbow in the big fountain.
After we checked in we had a little time to roam the museum on our own. I’ve been meaning to blog about how much I love the renovated dinosaur halls. The bases are cleverly designed to prohibit people touching the skeletons without putting railings or more than minimal glass in the way, and you can walk all the way around the mounted skeletons and look down on them from the mezzanine–none of that People’s Gloriously Efficient Cattle Chute of Compulsory Dinosaur Appreciation business. Signage is discreet and informative, and so are the handful of interactive gizmos. London and I spent a few minutes using a big touch-screen with a slider that controlled continental drift from the Triassic to the present–a nice example of using technology to add value to an exhibit without taking away from the real stuff that’s on display. There are even a few places to sit and just take it all in. That’s pretty much everything I want in a dinosaur hall.
Also, check out the jumbotron on the left in the above photo. It was running a (blessedly) narration-free video on how fossils are found, collected, prepared, mounted, and studied, on about a five-minute loop. Lots of pretty pictures. Including this next one.
There are a couple of levels of perspective distortion going on here, both in the original photo and in my photo of that photo projected on the jumbotron. Still, I feel confident positing that that is one goldurned big ilium. I’m not going to claim it’s the biggest bone I’ve ever seen–that rarely ends well–but sheesh, it’s gotta be pretty freakin’ big. And apparently a brachiosaurid, or close to it. Never mind, it’s almost certainly an upside-down Triceratops skull. Thanks to Adam Yates for the catch. I will now diminish, and go into the West.
Triceratops, Styracosaurus, and Einiosaurus–collect the whole set!
Of course, the centerpiece of the second dinosaur hall–and how great is it that there are two!?–is the T. rex trio: baby, juvenile (out of frame to the right), and subadult. Yes, subadult: the “big” one is not as big as the really big rexes, and from the second floor you can see unfused neural arches in some of the caudal vertebrae (many thanks to Ashley Fragomeni for pointing those out to me on a previous visit).
Awwwww! C’mere, little fella!
Still, this ain’t Vulgar Overstudied Theropod Picture of the Week. Here are some sweet pneumatic diplodocid caudals in the big wall o’ fossils (visible behind Mamenchisaurus in the overhead photo above). The greenish color is legit–in the Dino Lab on the second floor, they’re prepping a bunch of sauropod elements that look like they were carved out of jade.
Sudden violent topic shift, the reason for which will be become clear shortly: London and I have been sculpting weapons of mass predation in our spare time. In some of the photos you may be able to see his necklace, which has a shark tooth he sculpted himself. Here are a couple of allosaur claws I made–more on those another time.
The point is, enthusiasm for DIY fossils is running very high at Casa Wedel, so London’s favorite activity of the evening was molding and casting. Everyone got to make a press mold using a small theropod tooth, a trilobite, or a Velociraptor claw. Most of the kids I overheard opted for the tooth, but London went straight for the claw.
Ready for plaster! Everyone got to pick up their cast at breakfast this morning, with instructions to let them cure until this evening. All went well, so I’ll spare you a photo of this same shape in reverse.
We were split into three tribes of maybe 30-40 people each, and each tribe bedded down in a different hall. The T. rex and Raptor tribes got the North American wildlife halls, but our Triceratops tribe got the African wildlife hall, which as a place to sleep is about 900 times cooler. Someone had already claimed the lions when we got there, so London picked hyenas as our totem animals.
Lights out was at 10:30 PM, and the lights came back on at 7:00 this morning. Breakfast was out from 7:15 to 8:00, and then we had the museum to ourselves until the public came in at 9:30. So I got a lot of uncluttered photos of stuff I don’t usually get to photograph, like this ammonite. Everyone should have one of these.
London’s favorite dino in the museum is Carnotaurus. It’s sufficiently weird that I can respect that choice.
Not that there’s anything wrong with the old standards, especially when they’re presented as cleanly and innovatively as they are here.
Finally, the LACM has a no tripod policy, and if they see you trying to carry one in they will make you take it back to your car. At least during normal business hours. But no one searched my backpack when we went in last night, and I put that sucker to some good use. Including getting my first non-bigfoot picture of the cast Argentinosaurus dorsal. It was a little deja-vu-ey after just spending so much time with the giant Oklahoma Apatosaurus–elements of the two animals really are very comparable in size.
If you’re in the LA area and interested in spending a night at the museum–or at the tar pits!–check out the “Overnight Adventures” page on the museum’s website. Cost is $50 per person for members or $55 for non-members, and worth every penny IMHO. It’s one of those things I wish we’d done years ago.
Horrible tyrannosaurs of the Boston Museum of Science
July 11, 2012
My awesome employers Index Data flew us all out to Boston a few weeks ago, for six days of food, drink, work (yes, work!) and goofy tyrannosaurs.
There is really no excuse for this, is there?
SPECIAL BONUS: I am wearing my Xenoposeidon T-shirt.
MOLD-A-RAMA
May 3, 2012
I’m in Chicago, visiting the Field Museum, which means two things: Brachiosaurus (see below), and Mold-A-Rama. Downstairs from the great hall, on the ground floor, they have Mold-A-Rama machines, and I cannot resist their siren song.
The Mold-A-Rama is the king of novelty souvenirs. You can keep your stamped pennies, little pewter spoons, hand-painted bells, and refrigerator magnets. None of them is worthy to sully the presence of the awesome Mold-A-Rama. You put in two dollars, and then you get to watch as this hissing, clanking 1950s machine with tubes and wires and lights actually makes your item right in front of your eyes. A few minutes later, BAM, you’re holding a hot, smelly hunk of probably carcinogenic plastic that is so fresh from the mold that it is still a bit soft. You can’t buy that kind of authenticity–except from a Mold-A-Rama.
See that red thing, newly made, still in the bowels of the machine? That is MY T. rex!
This is my first Mold-A-Rama Triceratops. I already have a T. rex from my last visit, way back in 2005, which I can now pass on to my son. I also have a Stegosaurus, a Brontosaurus (shown but not commented on here), and a Trachodon. Yeah, yeah, I know the real animals are known as Apatosaurus and Edmontosaurus these days, but I’m not talking about the real animals. I’m talking about Mold-A-Rama, and trust me, the Mold-A-Rama critters are Brontosaurus and Trachodon. They drag their tails, they live in swamps, they’re cold-blooded and they died out from racial senescence (in about 1975, I think).
Finally, because Mike will straight-up murder me if I post from Chicago without it, here’s your friendly local not-quite-fully-mature mounted holotype specimen of Brachiosaurus:
Roadside reptile rampage!
October 5, 2010
What makes America great? The Constitution, the Grand Canyon, and the Statue of Liberty would probably make most peoples’ short lists. I’d also nominate chili cheeseburgers, the fact that we occasionally elect lunatics to high office just to keep the rest of the world from relaxing too much, and, of course, roadside dinosaurs.
Now, I know that there are dinosaur parks in other countries. Hell, dinosaur parks were invented in other countries. But I ask you: can you name another nation on earth wherein a bloody civil war that sunk the entire country into decades of social and political unrest is celebrated by imagining that it had been fought against freakin’ dinosaurs? (If you have no idea what I’m talking about, click here for more awesome that you are probably prepared for.) I submit that you cannot. No dinosaurs manning the guillotines in Paris, or the machine guns in St. Petersburg. I thought that W.J.T. Mitchell’s The Last Dinosaur Book was pretty darned loopy, but the chapter on how Americans celebrate being American by putting up gigantic dinosaurs all over the place struck a sympathetic chord in my heart. Because whatever you may want to believe to the contrary, we do put up gigantic dinosaurs all over the place. And if you’ve spent much time on the fabled open roads of this great land–which occupy even greater mythological space than our beloved saurians–you’ve seen ’em.
Case in point: the dinosaurs of Yucca Valley, California. These were a surprise to me when I discovered them this past weekend. I was on the road to Joshua Tree for a star party, and you can head on over to 10 Minute Astronomy for that end of this two-part inter-blog cross-country tale of national champion harmonica players, florescent arthropods, and welded scrap metal. Here in Part Dos I am only dealing with the saurischians.
And, oddly enough, they were all saurischians: a T. rex, two spinosaurs, and a mother and baby sauropod. All arrayed around the fence enclosing some kind of real estate office, right along California Highway 62 at the east end of the town of Yucca Valley. No signs with the dinosaurs, and no explanation of the connection, if any, between them and the business. Although the attraction is not that hard to fathom.
Also, I was happy to see that whereas the three stinkin’ theropods are unfenced and unchained, the sauropods are protected behind a spiky fence, and held down with both ropes and chains. Which, I admit, seems a bit excessive. But it also apparently means that potential giant-welded-dino thieves in the greater Yucca Valley area prefer sauropods, which I take as a sign of natural discernment and good taste in the population at large.
What does all of this mean? In part, it means I should probably revisit my policy on not blogging after midnight. But also, a local guy armed only with welding equipment and a pile of scrap metal decided that the best way to promote his business was by putting up some roadside dinosaurs. He could have built a State of Liberty or a St. Louis Arch or a moon rocket. But nobody would have stopped for those. People stop for roadside dinosaurs.
One more, for the road, as it were: an homage to Jerry Harris.
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 