DIY dinosaurs: more dinosaur bone standees

January 25, 2023

Michelle Stocker with an apatosaur vertebra (left) and a titanosaur femur (right), both made from foam core board.

In the last post I showed the Brachiosaurus humerus standee I made last weekend, and I said that the idea had been “a gleam in my eye for a long time”. That’s true, but it got kicked into high gear late in 2021 when I got an email from a colleague, Dr. Michelle Stocker at Virginia Tech. She wanted to know if I had any images of big sauropod bones that she could print at life size and mount to foam core board, to demonstrate the size of big sauropods to the students in her Age of Dinosaurs course. We had a nice conversation, swapped some image files, and then I got busy with teaching and kinda lost the plot. I got back to Michelle a couple of days ago to tell her about my Brach standee, and she sent the above photo, which I’m posting here with her permission.

That’s OMNH 1670, a dorsal vertebra of the giant Oklahoma apatosaurine and a frequent guest here at SV-POW!, and MPEF-PV 3400/27, the right femur of the giant titanosaur Patogotitan, from Otero et al. (2020: fig. 8). (Incidentally, that femur is 236cm [7 feet, 9 inches] long, or 35cm longer than our brachiosaur humerus.) For this project Michelle vectorized the images so they wouldn’t look low-res, and she used 0.5-inch foam core board. She’s been using both standees in her Age of Dinosaurs class at VT (GEOS 1054) every fall semester, and she says they’re a lot of fun at outreach events. You can keep up with Michelle and the rest of the VT Paleobiology & Geobiology lab group at their research page, and follow them @VTechmeetsPaleo on Twitter.

Michelle’s standees are fully rad, and naturally I’m both jealous and desirous of making my own. I’ve been wanting a plywood version of OMNH 1670 forever. If I attempt a Patagotitan femur, I’ll probably follow Michelle’s lead and use foam core board instead of plywood — the plywood Brach humerus already gets heavy on a long trek from the house or the vehicle.

Speaking of, one thing to think about if you decide to go for a truly prodigious bone is how you’ll transport it. I can haul the Brach humerus standee in my Kia Sorento, but I have to fold down the middle seats and either angle it across the back standing on edge, or scoot the passenger seat all the way forward so I can lay it down flat. I could *maybe* get the Patagotitan femur in, but it would have to go across the tops of the passenger seats and it would probably rest against the windshield.

Thierra Nalley and me with tail vertebrae of Haplocanthosaurus (smol) and the giant Oklahoma apatosaur (ginormous), at the Tiny Titan exhibit opening.

As long as I’m talking about cool stuff other people have built, a formative forerunner of my project was the poster Alton Dooley made for the Western Science Center’s Tiny Titan exhibit, which features a Brontosaurus vertebra from Ostrom & McIntosh (1966) blown up to size of OMNH 1331, the largest centrum of the giant Oklahoma apatosaurine (or any known apatosaurine). I wouldn’t mind having one of those incarnated in plywood, either.

I’ll bet more things like this exist in the world. If you know of one — or better yet, if you’ve built one — I’d love to hear about it.

References

  • Alejandro Otero , José L. Carballido & Agustín Pérez Moreno. 2020. The appendicular osteology of Patagotitan mayorum (Dinosauria, Sauropoda). Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, DOI: 10.1080/02724634.2020.1793158
  • Ostrom, John H., and John S. McIntosh. 1966. Marsh’s Dinosaurs. Yale University Press, New Haven and London. 388 pages including 65 absurdly beautiful plates.
Posted by Matt Wedel
Filed in caudal, diplodocids, DIY, DIY dinosaurs, dorsal, femur, Giant Oklahoma apatosaurine, gratuitous badassery, Haplocanthosaurus, Patagotitan, People we like, size, stinkin' appendicular elements, stinkin' mammals, stinkin' SV-POW!sketeers, titanosaur, Western Science Center
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DIY dinosaurs: building a life-size Brachiosaurus humerus standee

January 23, 2023

Building life-size standees of big dinosaur bones has been a gleam in my eye for a long time. What finally pushed me over the edge was an invitation from Oakmont Outdoor School here in Claremont, California, to come talk about dinosaurs. It was an outdoor assembly, with something like 280 kids in attendance, and most of my show and tell materials are hand-sized and would not show up well from a distance. Plus, I wanted to blow people away with the actual size of big dinosaur bones.

 

I started with a life-size poster print of FHPR 17108, the complete right humerus of Brachiosaurus from Brachiosaur Gulch in Utah (the story of the discovery and excavation of that specimen is here). I used the image shown above, scaled to print at 7 feet by 3 feet. You can see that print lying on my living room floor in the previous post.

It was simpler and cheaper to get two 2 foot x 4 foot pieces of plywood than one big piece, so that’s what I did. I laid them out on the living room floor, cut out the poster print of the humerus from its background, traced the outline of the humerus onto the plywood, and then took the pieces outside to cut out the humerus shapes with a jigsaw.

The big piece of darker plywood is the brace that holds the two front pieces together. The smaller piece down at the distal end is a sort of foot, level with the bottom of the humerus but wider and flatter to give more stability. I used wood glue and a bunch of screws to hold everything together. Probably more screws than were strictly necessary, but I wanted to build this thing once and then never worry about it again, and screws and glue are cheap.

Even just the plywood outline without the print glued on looked pretty good. Early in the project I dithered on whether to make the thing out of plywood or foam core board. Foam core board would have been cheaper, easier to work with, and a lot lighter, but I also had doubts about its survivability. I want to use this thing for outreach for a long time to come.

To make the thing free-standing I added a kickstand in the back, made from a six-foot board and a hinge.

I used some screw-eyes and steel wire from a picture-hanging kit to add restraints to the kickstand, so it can’t open up all the way and collapse.

I didn’t want the kickstand flopping around during transit, and I also did not want the whole weight of the kickstand hanging cantilevered from the hinge when this thing is being carried horizontally, so I added a couple of blocks on either side for support, and some peel-and-stick velcro to hold the kickstand in place when it’s not being used.

I took the thing to Oakmont Outdoor School this morning and everybody loved it. I think the teachers were just as impressed as the kids. That’s Jenny Adams, the principal at Oakmont, who invited me to come speak. 

This was a deeply satisfying project and it didn’t require any complex or difficult techniques. The biggest expense was the big poster print, and the most specialized piece of equipment was the jigsaw. You could save money by going black-and-white or just blowing up an outline drawing on a plotter, by scavenging the plywood instead of buying new (all my old plywood has been turned into stuff already), or by using foam core board or some other lightweight material.

Many thanks to Jenny Adams and the whole Oakmont community for giving me a chance to come speak, and for asking so many excellent questions. However much fun it was for you all, I’m pretty sure it was even more fun for me. And now I have an inconveniently gigantic Brachiosaurus humerus to worship play with!

Posted by Matt Wedel
Filed in Brachiosaur Gulch, brachiosaurids, Brachiosaurus, DIY, DIY dinosaurs, humerus, People we like, stinkin' appendicular elements, stinkin' mammals, stinkin' SV-POW!sketeers, timely
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I am about a great work

January 21, 2023

I’m also teaching in two anatomy courses and in the process of moving residences (hence bins and boxes and whatnot), so the timing’s…not great. But needs must when the devil drives.

Further bulletins as events warrant.

Posted by Matt Wedel
Filed in Brachiosaur Gulch, brachiosaurids, Brachiosaurus, DIY, humerus, stinkin' appendicular elements, timely
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Shark week 4: megalodon tooth colonized by boring clams

November 9, 2022

Alert readers probably noticed that I titled the first post in this series “Matt’s first megalodon tooth“, implying that there would be other megalodon teeth to follow. Here’s my second one.

At first glance, this is a pretty jacked-up megalodon tooth. It is pocked with circular and ovoid craters, and has a big fat hole drilled right through it. Hardly collector grade! And in fact that’s what first caught my attention about this tooth — it’s a 6-incher that was being offered for an enticingly low price. But I got even more excited when I clicked past the thumbnail image on the sale site and saw precisely how this tooth was damaged. This is not random, senseless taphonomic battery (ahem); this tooth was colonized by a bunch of boring clams.


Like Adam Savage — and, I suspect, most collectors-of-things — I am fascinated by objects and the stories that they tell. And this tooth tells several stories. First, it’s a huge tooth from a huge shark, a truly vast, multi-ton animal heavier than a T. rex and longer than my house. Second, it’s a fossil that’s millions of years old, evidence of an extinct species from a vanished ecology, one where gigantic sharks and macroraptorial sperm whales hunted small baleen whales, early seals and sea lions, and manatees and sea cows. And third, it’s a relic of another, entirely different ecology, one in which this shed tooth sank to the sea floor and was colonized by a host of smaller organisms, including most obviously hole-boring clams. In effect, this one tooth was a miniature reef, supporting multiple species of invertebrates. The traces left by those invertebrates are themselves ichnofossils, so this tooth is a body fossil with ichnofossils dug out of it. It’s turtles all the way down!


Can we figure out what any of those invertebrates were? Just a few years ago that would have been a challenging task for a non-specialist, but fortunately in 2019 Harry Maisch and colleagues published a really cool paper, “Macroborings in Otodus megalodon and Otodus chubutensis shark teeth from the submerged shelf of Onslow Bay, North Carolina, USA: implications for processes of lag deposit formation”. That paper is very well illustrated, and the figures basically serve as a field guide for anyone who wants to identify similar traces in rocks or teeth of equivalent age. I will take up that sword in a future post.

Incidentally, this is now the biggest tooth in my little collection, just slightly — but noticeably — bigger than my first megalodon tooth: 157mm on the long side, vs 155mm, and 112mm max root width, vs 107mm.

Bonus goofy observation: I strongly suspect that no other megalodon tooth in the world beats this one in simulating a Star Trek phaser.

Reference

Maisch IV, H.M., Becker, M.A. and Chamberlain Jr, J.A. 2020. Macroborings in Otodus megalodon and Otodus chubutensis shark teeth from the submerged shelf of Onslow Bay, North Carolina, USA: implications for processes of lag deposit formation. Ichnos 27(2): 122-141.

Posted by Matt Wedel
Filed in freakin sharks, hands used as scale bars, ichnofossils, megalodon, stinkin' appendicular elements, stinkin' every thing that's not a sauropod, taphonomy, teeth
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Shark week 2: great white teeth redux

November 6, 2022

Cast (white) and fossil (gray) great white shark teeth, lingual (tongue) sides.

Something cool came in the mail today: a fossil tooth of a great white shark, Carcharodon carcharias. The root is a bit eroded, but the enamel-covered crown is in great shape, and it’s almost exactly the same size as my cast tooth from a modern great white.

The labial (outer or lip-facing) sides of the same teeth.

I got this for a couple of reasons. One, I wanted a real great white shark tooth to show people alongside my megalodon tooth (for which see the previous post). Extant great whites are quite rightly protected, and their teeth are outside my price range when they are available at all. Fortunately there are zillions of fossil great white teeth to be had.

Also, the cast great white tooth has been kind of a disappointment. It’s so white that it’s actually a letdown, visually. Tactilely it’s great, with all kinds of subtle features on the crown especially, but those features are almost impossible to see or photograph. In the photo above, you can make out some of the long, smooth wrinkles in the enamel of the cast tooth, but the median ridge, which is dead obvious on the fossil tooth, only shows up under very low-angle lighting on the cast. The fossil tooth is just a more interesting and more informative specimen, material and origin aside. Now that I have it, I might try either staining or painting the cast tooth, to see if I can rehabilitate it as a visual object.

This fossil tooth is also noticeably thicker than the cast tooth. I don’t know if that’s serial, individual, population, or evolutionary variation. In the last post I contrasted the proportional thinness of the cast tooth with the robustness of the megalodon tooth; this fossil tooth might fare a little better if subjected to the same comparison. I should have thought to do that when I was taking these photos.

Speaking of comparisons, here’s megalodon to remind everyone who’s boss. There’s no scale bar here, but the cast great white tooth is 65mm from the tip of the crown to the tip of the longer root, and the meg tooth is 155mm between the same points.

Now I have a gleam in my eye of assembling a couple of sets of fossil teeth: one to illustrate the evolution of the modern great white from its less-serrated ancestors, like this diagram from the great white Wikipedia page, and one to illustrate the evolution of megalodon from its side-cusped ancestors, like this diagram from the megalodon page — presuming that current hypotheses for the two lineages are accurate. If I ever get either set done, I’m sure I’ll yap about it here.

Posted by Matt Wedel
Filed in freakin sharks, hands used as scale bars, megalodon, stinkin' appendicular elements, teeth
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Matt’s first megalodon tooth

November 5, 2022

 

I got this thing a while back. I’d always wanted one, and it really does spark joy.

First up: what should we call this critter? AFAIK, the species name has never been in doubt, it’s always been [Somegenus] megalodon. That genus has variously been argued to be Carcharodon (same as the extant great white shark, Carcharodon carcharias), Carcharocles, Otodus, Megaselachus, and probably others. From my limited reading, the current consensus seems to be converging on Otodus, for reasons that seem reasonable to me, but I’m hardly an expert on this problem. It’s not that I think it’s unimportant, more that the generic identity of [Somegenus] megalodon has been historically labile, and as a non-expert I hesitate to come down firmly behind any of the hypotheses. If it’s still Otodus megalodon in another decade, I might take a stand. If you want to do a deep dive on this, check out Kent (2018: 80-85). In the meantime, I’m going to refer to it informally as ‘megalodon’, without italics. Although the actual genus name Megalodon was tragically wasted a fossil clam (true story), I’m confident that no-one, scientist or layperson, will misunderstand when I refer to the humongous extinct megatoothed shark as megalodon.

With that out of the way: wow, that’s a big freakin’ tooth! Here it is again with a scale bar.

The serrations on the sides are very cool. The edges are worn a bit in places, and that plus the visible notch on one side of the tooth (upper left in the photo above) suggests that this tooth was used, as opposed to being a replacement tooth that rotted out of the jaw before it ever had a chance to be deployed. Where ‘used’ means ‘used to punch and then tear immense holes in other animals’. Pretty wild to think about ancient whales dying on this very tooth.

I use this thing at outreach events, and I got a cast tooth of a modern great white shark for comparison. Those great white teeth are 10 bucks at Bone Clones, so I got a bunch of them and gave them to nieces and nephews as stocking stuffers.

Here’s a labeled version. From what I’ve been able to determine (i.e., shark people, please correct me if I’m wrong!), most shark teeth ‘lean’ away from the body midline. Upper teeth of megalodon tend to be very wide, with wide, shallow angles at the base, whereas lower teeth are more dagger-shaped and have a more pronounced basal angle. I’m pretty sure this meg tooth is a lower, and we’re looking at the lingual (tongue) side in this photo (more on that in a bit), so the tooth is facing the same way we are. I think that makes it a left lower tooth. The great white tooth is a probably a left upper, although great whites apparently have one tooth position that leans mesially instead of distally, so I could have that one wrong-sided. The ‘bourlette’ is an area of exposed orthodentine between the root and the enamel that covers the tooth crown (Kent 2018: 86). This tooth is not in perfect shape, there’s been some peeling of the enamel just above the bourlette. 

I think this photo makes the size-comparison point even more clearly.

Worth noting: if the hypothesis that megalodon belongs in Otodus is correct, the similarities between megalodon and the great white shark are convergent; megalodon teeth are Otodus teeth that lost their side-cusps, and great white teeth are basically wider, serrated mako teeth. That level of convergence shouldn’t be surprising to anyone who has seen a thylacine skull. Still, this photo makes it very obvious why Louis Agassiz assigned megalodon to Carcharodon, the great white shark genus, when he named the species back in 1843: the two look a lot alike. (Also: Agassiz didn’t have all the transitional fossils that we do now.)

Boomerang thought, added in post: at least, megalodon teeth look a lot like the upper teeth of great whites. The lower teeth of great whites are much narrower and more mako-esque. 

A couple of features worth noting here. The mesial margin has a little wrinkle, which cannot be damage because the serrations follow the in-folded contour. This seems to be a minor developmental anomaly that is pretty common in megalodon teeth. The distal margin has a distinct notch, also mentioned above, which probably represents feeding damage sustained in life.

Arguably this side-view is even more striking; the megalodon tooth is 2.38 times the length of the great white tooth (155mm vs 65mm on the long side), but more than three times as thick (29mm vs 9mm max thickness), and the blade of the tooth stays proportionally thicker over more of its length. This tooth was built to do some work.

Am I fanboying here? Sure, a little (and not for the first time). Giant extinct monsters are exciting, and I’m happy to celebrate that while also wanting to know more about how they lived.

The thing that surprised me the most while reading up on shark teeth is how they are oriented in the jaws. I’d always assumed that the convex faces (toward the bottom of the above photo) faced outward (labial or lip-facing), and the flat faces (toward the top of the above photo) faced inward (lingual or tongue-facing), but it’s actually opposite. In the photo above, the labial or outward faces are up, and the lingual or inward faces are down. I’m sure this is old hat to shark people, but it hurts my head. Most teeth I know of have their convex faces outward, like human incisors and tyrannosaur premaxillary teeth. Plus, instinctively it seems like predator teeth should curve toward the back of the mouth, but with their flat labial faces and convex lingual faces, most shark teeth seem to curve toward the front (I realize that they may have been placed in the jaws so that they still pointed backwards overall). I was so surprised by this that I did a lot of checking before bringing it up in this post, but it’s clear even in really good photos of live great white sharks with their mouths open. There’s no bigger story here, just me confronting my own misapprehension about animal morphology. Still seems weird.

If you want to know more about how megalodon lived, I’ve included links below to some papers on its size (Shimada 2019, Shimada et al. 2020, Cooper et al. 2020, 2022, Perez et al. 2021), breeding habits and life history (Miller et al. 2018, Shimada et al. 2021, 2022), evolution (Shimada et al. 2016, Kent 2018, Perez et al. 2018), and paleobiology (Maisch et al. 2019, Ballell and Ferron 2021, Miller et al. 2022, Sternes et al. 2022). This is a highly idiosyncratic collection based on like one evening of messing around on Google Scholar. I’m sure I missed tons of important work, so feel free to recommend more refs in the comments.

Oh, like virtually everything else on this site, these photos are freely available under the CC-BY license, so if you want to use them, modify them, etc., go nuts.

References

Posted by Matt Wedel
Filed in freakin sharks, hands used as scale bars, megalodon, stinkin' appendicular elements, stinkin' every thing that's not a sauropod, teeth
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The femur of Argyrosaurus, maybe

November 1, 2021

FMNH P13018 with me for scale. Photo by Holly Woodward.

Some of the Burpee Museum folks and PaleoFest speakers visited the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago after the 2020 ‘Fest. I hadn’t been there since 2012, and a lot had changed. More on that in future posts, maybe. Here I am with FMNH 13018, a right femur referred by von Huene (1929) to Argyrosaurus superbus (note, though, that Mannion and Otero 2012 considered this specimen to be Titanosauria indet., hence the hedge in the title of the post). It’s 211cm long, which is pretty darn big but still well short of the record.

Speaking of the record, here’s a list of the largest sauropod femora (as always, updates in the comments are welcome!):

  1. 250cm – Argentinosaurus huinculensis, MLP-DP 46-VIII-21-3 (estimated when complete)
  2. 238cm – Patagotitan mayorum, MPEF-3399/44
  3. 236cm – Patagotitan mayorum, MPEF-PV 3400/27
  4. 235cm – Patagotitan mayorum, MPEF-PV 3400/27
  5. 235cm – “Antarctosaurus” giganteus, MLP 26-316
  6. 214cm – Giraffatitan brancai, XV1
  7. 211cm – cf. Argyrosaurus superbus, FMNH P13018
  8. 203cm – Brachiosaurus altithorax, FMNH P25107
  9. 200cm – Ruyangosaurus giganteus, 41HIII -0002 (estimated when complete)
  10. 191cm – Dreadnoughtus schrani, MPM-PV 1156

The list is necessarily incomplete, because we have no preserved femora for Puertasaurus, Notocolossus, Futalognkosaurus, or the largest individuals of Sauroposeidon and Alamosaurus, all of which probably had femora in the 210-250cm range. For that matter, most elements of the giant Oklahoma apatosaurine are 25%-33% larger than the equivalent bones in CM 3018, which implies a femur length of 223-237cm (scaled up from the 178.5cm femur of CM 3018). I’m deliberately not dealing with Maraapunisaurus or horrifying hypothetical barosaurs here.

In any case, it’s still a prodigious bone, and well worth spending a moment with the next time you’re at the Field Musuem.

References

  • Mannion, P.D. and Otero, A., 2012. A reappraisal of the Late Cretaceous Argentinean sauropod dinosaur Argyrosaurus superbus, with a description of a new titanosaur genus. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 32(3):614-638.
  • Von Huene, F. 1929. Los saurisquios y ornitisquios del Creta´ceo Argentino. Anales del Museo de La Plata 3:1–196.
Posted by Matt Wedel
Filed in Argyrosaurus, femur, Field Museum (Chicago), museums, public galleries, stinkin' appendicular elements, titanosaur
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The Wiren Apatosaurus femur is on exhibit in the Moab Museum

October 19, 2021

 

The last time we saw the sauropod femur that Paige Wiren discovered sticking out of a riverbank, it had been moved into the prep lab at the Moab Museum, with the idea that it would eventually go on exhibit as a touch specimen for the public to enjoy and be inspired by. That has come to pass.

I was in Moab last month with Drs. Jessie Atterholt and Thierra Nalley and we stopped in the Moab Museum to digitize some vertebrae from SUSA 515, an unusual specimen of Camarasaurus that I’ve blogged about before, and will definitely blog about again. While we were there, we got to see and touch the Wiren femur. The museum folks told us that femur has been the first dinosaur bone that a lot of schoolkids and tourists have seen up close, or gotten to touch. As a former dinosaur-obsessed kid who never stopped being excited about touching real dinosaur bones–and as one of the lucky folks that got to rescue this particular fossil from erosion or poaching–that pleases me deeply. 

So, obviously, you should go see this thing. And the rest of the museum–as you can see from the photos above, the whole place has been renovated, and there are lots of interesting fossils from central and eastern Utah on display, not to mention loads of historical artifacts, all nicely presented in a clean, open, well-lit space that invites exploration. Go have fun!

Posted by Matt Wedel
Filed in Apatosaurus, diplodocids, femur, Museum of Moab, museums, public galleries, stinkin' appendicular elements, stinkin' mammals, stinkin' SV-POW!sketeers
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Matt Wedel will be yapping about Brachiosaurus. Again.

October 7, 2021

I have the honor of giving the National Fossil Day Virtual Lecture for The Museums of Western Colorado – Dinosaur Journey, next Wednesday, October 13, from 7:00 to 8:00 PM, Mountain Daylight Time. The title of my talk is “Lost Giants of the Jurassic” but it’s mostly going to be about Brachiosaurus. And since I have a whole hour to fill, I’m gonna kitchen-sink this sucker and put in all the good stuff, even more than last time. The talk is virtual (via Zoom) and free, and you can register at this link.

The photo up top is from this July. That’s John Foster (standing) and me (crouching) with the complete right humerus of Brachiosaurus that we got out of the ground in 2019; that story is here. The humerus is in the prep lab at the Utah Field House of Natural History State Park Museum in Vernal, and if you go there, you can peer through the tall glass windows between the museum’s central atrium and the prep lab and see it for yourself.

If you’ve forgotten what a humerus like that looks like in context, here’s the mounted Brachiosaurus skeleton at the North American Museum of Ancient Life with my research student, Kaelen Kay, for scale. Kaelen is 5’8″ (173cm) and as you can see, she can just get her hand on the animal’s elbow. The humerus–in this case, a cast of the right humerus from the Brachiosaurus altithorax holotype–is the next bone up the line. Kaelen came out with us this summer and helped dig up some more of our brachiosaur–more on that story in the near future.

Want more Brachiosaurus? Tune in next week. Here’s that registration link again. I hope to see you there!

Posted by Matt Wedel
Filed in brachiosaurids, Brachiosaurus, humerus, museums, navel blogging, People we like, stinkin' appendicular elements, stinkin' mammals, stinkin' SV-POW!sketeers, timely, Utah Field House of Natural History
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What a dream I had!

January 31, 2021

Oh, hey, so you know how the most tedious thing you can ever hear is someone recounting one of their dreams? I want to tell you about a dream I had last night.

Brian Curtice’s grandfather was in a position of authority to express condemnation of a group of people who had lost the electronic archives of the Daily Telegraph, but declined to do so. So I became part of a woke mob that went to Curtice’s house to express our displeasure to him. I got distracted by an outbuilding when we arrived, went in, and found that it contained the Sonorosaurus type material, which for some reason included two really nice scapulocoracoids. At that point my Index Data colleague Wayne (also part of the woke mob) wandered in and I expressed to him that I was having second thoughts about this whole protest and that my first concern now was protecting the holotype against the more indiscriminate members of the mob. But I kept thinking to myself “Why is this material even here? If anything, it should be in an outbuilding at Kevin Ratkevic’s house.” Then Wayne and I spotted a bunch of computer monitors running software that Curtice had written earlier in his life, and it became apparent that he was the creator of a Commodore 64 adventure game called Pilgrim for which the publishers had ripped off an 8×8 old-English-style character set that I had used in a game I’d published with them.

Ratkevic (1988:figure 4).Lower hind limb including tibia, fibula, and nearly complete left pes of Sonorasaurus thompsoni holotype ASDM 500. Elements found associated but not articulated. Entire assembled length 137 cm. Photo by Jeanne Broome.

So. I never remember dreams in this kind of detail. The fact that I did on this on occasion is strange to me — but then, these are strange times. A quick run-down of what is and isn’t true:

  • So far as I know, the Daily Telegraph archives have not been lost.
  • Brian Curtice is a sauropod palaeontologist, maybe best known for his work reassessing Jensen’s Dry Mesa sauropods (e.g. Curtice et al. 1996, Curtice and Stadtman 2001); I have no idea if he has a grandfather and whether he has any involvement with archives.
  • I do not know where Brian lives, or whether he has any fossils at his house. I highly doubt he has holotypes.
  • The holotype of Sonorasaurus does not include any shoulder-girdle material, but it was indeed described by Ratkevich (1988) — but Ron, not Kevin.
  • There really was a Commodore 64 adventure game called Pilgrim, published by CRL, and they really did re-use — without my permission — the character set I had defined in The Causes of Chaos, which I had published with them not long before.
  • But Pilgrim was by Rod Pike, and I very highly doubt that Brian Curtice, even if he was a C64 programmer in the early-mid 90s, ever published any games with a UK-based software house.

Matt’s response when I told him about this dream:

Just got to the scapulocoracoids and LLOL
“my first concern now was protecting the holotype against the more indiscriminate members of the mob.” LLOL x infinity
Well, I gotta tell you, that was a ride.
Jurassic-Park-style, through your hindbrain.
It had everything!
Woke mobs, holotypes, old school adventure games, intellectual property (at the start and at the end)
lost archives
this is so specific in so many weirdly-specialized areas that whole schools may spring up to interpret it. You might accidentally found a new religion.

All right, folks: interpret for me!

References

  • Curtice, Brian D., Kenneth L. Stadtman and Linda J. Curtice. 1996. A reassessment of Ultrasauros macintoshi (Jensen, 1985). The continental Jurassic (M. Morales, ed.): Museum of Northern Arizona Bulletin 60:87–95.
  • Curtice, Brian D. and Kenneth L. Stadtman. 2001. The demise of Dystylosaurus edwini and a revision of Supersaurus vivianae. Western Association of Vertebrate Paleontologists and Mesa Southwest Museum and Southwest Paleontologists Symposium, Bulletin 8:33–40.
  • Ratkevich, Ron. 1998. New Cretaceous brachiosaurid dinosaur, Sonorasaurus thompsoni gen et sp. nov, from Arizona. Journal of the Arizona-Nevada Academy of Science 31:71–82.
Posted by Mike Taylor
Filed in 100% totally real, brachiosaurids, stinkin' appendicular elements
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