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.
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!
I’m not 100% sure what this is, but it exists
October 8, 2022
Darren, the silent partner at SV-POW!, pointed me to this tweet by Duc de Vinney, displaying a tableau of “A bunch of Boners (people who study bones) Not just paleontologists, some naturalists and cryptozoologists too”, apparently commissioned by @EDGEinthewild:
As you can see, Darren, Matt and I (as well as long-time Friend Of SV-POW! Mark Witton) somehow all made it into the cartoon, ahead of numerous far more deserving people. Whatever the criterion was, and whatever reason Edge In The Wild had for wanting this, I am delighted to be included alongside the likes of Owen, Osborn, Cope, Marsh, and Bob Bakker. Even if the caricatures are not especially flattering.
Here is an edit showing only the three of us, which I am sure I will find many fruitful uses for:
My thanks to Duc de Vinney for creating this!
New documentary film streaming now: Science Friction
April 21, 2022
Long-time readers may recall that back in 2009, I was quote-mined in the television documentary series Clash of the Dinosaurs (1, 2, 3). Turns out, such misrepresentations are not that uncommon, and now there’s a whole feature-length documentary about the problem, titled Science Friction. The trailer is above, and the film’s homepage is here. It’s streaming on Amazon Prime Video and on Tubi (maaaybe for free? I don’t have a Tubi subscription but the film plays in browser for me with no payment…). Science Friction has earned a decent number of film festival accolades, and I’m proud to have been involved.
Note to my future navel-gazing self: I’m on at 0:19:40 to 0:21:21, and again from 1:22:21 to 1:22:50.
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!
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!
I misconstrued the review history of the paper discussed in the last post: my apologies
May 21, 2021
Two days ago, I wrote about what seemed to be an instance of peer review gone very wrong. I’ve now heard from two of the four authors of the paper and from the reviewer in question — both by email, and in comments on the original post — and it’s apparent that I misinterpreted the situation. When the lead author’s tweet mentioned “pushing it through eight rounds of review”, I took this at face value as meaning eight rounds at the same journal with the same reviewers — whereas in fact the reviewer in question reviewed only four drafts. (That still seems like too many to me, but clearly it’s not as ludicrous as the situation as I misread it.) In this light, my assumption that the reviewer was being obstructive was not warranted.
I have decided to retract that article and I offer my apologies to the reviewer, Dave Grossnickle, who approached me very politely off-list to offer the corrections that you can now read in his comment.
Giraffe and human metacarpals compared
May 30, 2020
Here’s one of my most prized possessions: a cannon bone from a giraffe. I got it last fall from Necromance, a cool natural history store in LA. Originally they had a matched pair on display in the front window. Jessie Atterholt got one of them last summer, and I got the other a few months later.
The cannon bones of hoofed mammals consist of fused metacarpals (in the forelimbs) or metatarsals (in the hindlimbs). In this case, the giraffe cannon bone in the top photo is the one from the right forelimb, consisting of the fused 3rd and 4th metacarpals, which correspond to the bones in the human hand leading to the middle and ring fingers. Only my third metacarpal is traced in the top photo. For maximum homology goodness I should have traced MC4, too, but I’m lazy.
I didn’t know that this was a right forelimb cannon bone when I got it. In fact, I only figured that out this afternoon, thanks to the figures and text descriptions in Rios et al. (2016), which I got free through Palaeontologia Electronica (you can too). The weirdly large and perfectly circular holes at the ends of my cannon bone were clearly drilled out by somone, I guess maybe for mounting purposes? At first I thought it might have been to help the marrow cook out of the shaft of the bone during simmering and degreasing, but none of the drilled holes intersect the main marrow cavity, they’re just in the sponge of trabecular bone at the ends of the element.
This post is a sequel to one from last year, “Brachiosaurus and human metacarpals compared“, which featured metacarpal 3 from BYU 4744, the partial skeleton of Brachiosaurus from Potter Creek, Colorado. I know what everyone’s thinking: can we make these two high-browsing giants throw hands?
Yes, yes we can. The giraffe cannon bone is 75.5cm long, and the brachiosaur metacarpal is 57cm long, or 75.5% the length of the giraffe element. I scaled the two bones correctly in the above image. My hands aren’t the same size because they’re at different distances from the camera, illustrating the age-old dictum that scale bars are not to be trusted.
The Potter Creek brachiosaur is one of the largest in the world–here’s me with a cast of its humerus–but ‘my’ giraffe is not. World-record giraffes are about 19 feet tall (5.8m), and doing some quick-and-dirty cross-scaling using the skeleton photo above suggests that the metacarpal cannon bone in a world-record giraffe should be pushing 90cm. So the giraffe my cannon bone is from was probably between 15.5 and 16 feet tall (4.7-4.9m), which is still nothing to sniff at.
I don’t know how this bone came to be at Necromance. I assume from an estate sale or something. I only visited for the first time last year, and at that time they had three real bones from giraffes out in the showroom: the two cannon bones and a cervical vertebra. They might have put out more stuff since–it’s been about six months since I’ve been there–but all of the giraffe bones they had at that point have been snapped up by WesternU anatomists. Jessie and I got the cannon bones, and Thierra Nalley got the cervical vertebra, which is fair since she works on the evolution of necks (mostly in primates–see her Google Scholar page here). I don’t know if there are any photos of Thierra’s cervical online, but Jessie did an Instagram post on her cannon bone, which is nearly as long as her whole damn leg.
There will be more anatomy coming along soon, and probably some noodling about sauropods. Stay tuned!
Reference
On today’s episode of the I Know Dino postcast, Garret interviews Brian and me about our new Brachiosaurus bones and how we got them out of the field. You should listen to the whole thing, but we’re on from 10:10 to 48:15. Here’s the link, go have fun. Many thanks to the I Know Dino crew for their interest, and to Garret for being such a patient and accommodating host. Amazingly, there is a much longer version of the interview available for I Know Dino Patreon supporters, so check that out for more Brachiosaurus yap than you are probably prepared for.
The photo is an overhead shot of me, Casey Cordes, and Yara Haridy smoothing down a plaster wrap around the middle of humerus. The 2x4s aren’t on yet, and the sun is low, so this must have been in the late afternoon on our first day in the quarry in October. Photo by Brian Engh, who perched up on top of the boulder next to the bone to get this shot.
For the context of the Brach-straction, see Part 1 of Jurassic Reimagined on Brian’s paleoart YouTube channel, and stay tuned for more.
Nature’s CT machine, part 2: an apatosaurine in the Salt Wash
January 28, 2020
In the last post, we looked at some sauropod vertebrae exposed in cross-section at our field sites in the Salt Wash member of the Morrison Formation. This time, we’re going to do it again! Let’s look at another of my faves from the field, with Thuat Tran’s hand for scale. And, er, a scale bar for scale:
And let’s pull the interesting bits out of the background:
Now, confession time. When I first saw this specimen, I interpeted it as-is, right-side up. The round thing in the middle with the honeycomb of internal spaces is obviously the condyle of a vertebra, and the bits sticking out above and below on the sides frame a cervical rib loop. I figured the rounded bit at the upper right was the ramus of bone heading for the prezyg, curved over as I’ve seen it in some taxa, including the YPM Barosaurus. And the two bits below the centrum would then be the cervical ribs. And with such big cervical rib loops and massive, low-hanging cervical ribs, it had to an apatosaurine, either Apatosaurus or Brontosaurus.
Then I got my own personal Cope-getting-Elasmosaurus-backwards moment, courtesy of my friend and fellow field adventurer, Brian Engh, who proposed this:
Gotta say, this makes a lot more sense. For one, the cervical ribs would be lateral to the prezygs, just as in, oh, pretty much all sauropods. And the oddly flat inward-tilted surfaces on what are now the more dorsal bones makes sense: they’re either prezyg facets, or the flat parts of the rami right behind the prezyg facets. The missing thing on what is now the right even makes sense: it’s the other cervical rib, still buried in a projecting bit of sandstone. That made no sense with the vert the other way ’round, because prezygs always stick out farther in front than do the cervical ribs. And we know that we’re looking at the vert from the front, otherwise the backwards-projecting cervical rib would be sticking through that lump of sandstone, coming out of the plane of the photo toward us.
Here’s what I now think is going on:
I’m still convinced that the bits of bone on what is now the left side of the image are framing a cervical rib loop. And as we discussed in the last post, the only Morrison sauropods with such widely-set cervical ribs are Camarasaurus and the apatosaurines. So what makes this an apatosaurine rather than a camarasaur? I find several persuasive clues:
- If we have this thing the right way up, those prezygs are waaay up above the condyle, at a proportional distance I’ve only seen in diplodocids. See, for example, this famous cervical from CM 3018, the holotype of A. louisae (link).
- The complexity of the pneumatic honeycombing inside the condyle is a much better fit for an apatosaurine than for Camarasaurus–I’ve never seen that level of complexity in a camarasaur vert.
- The bump on what we’re now interpreting as the cervical rib looks suspiciously like one of the ventrolateral processes that Kent Sanders and I identified in apatosaurine cervicals back in our 2002 paper. I’ve never seen them, or seen them reported, in Camarasaurus–and I’ve been looking.
- Crucially, the zygs are not set very far forward of the cervical ribs. By some rare chance, this is pretty darned close to a pure transverse cut, and the prezygs, condyle (at its posterior extent, anyway), and the one visible cervical rib are all in roughly the same plane. In Camarasaurus, the zygs strongly overhang the front end of the centrum in the cervicals (see this and this).
But wait–aren’t the cervical ribs awfully high for this to be an apatosaurine? We-ell, not necessarily. This isn’t a very big vert; max centrum width here is 175mm, only about a third the diameter of a mid-cervical from something like CM 3018. So possibly this is from the front of the neck, around the C3 or C4 position, where the cervical ribs are wide but not yet very deep. You can see something similar in this C2-C5 series on display at BYU:
Or, maybe it’s just one of the weird apatosaurine verts that has cervical rib loops that are wide, but not very deep. Check out this lumpen atrocity at Dinosaur Journey–and more importantly, the apatosaur cervical he’s freaking out over:
UPDATE just a few minutes later: Mike reminded me in the comments about the Tokyo apatosaurine, NSMT-PV 20375, which has wide-but-not-deep cervical ribs. In fact, C7 (the vertebra on the right in this figure) is a pretty good match for the Salt Wash specimen:
NSMT-PV 20375, cervical vertebrae 3, 6 and 7 in anterior and posterior views. Modified from Upchurch et al. (2005: plate 2).
UPDATE the 2nd: After looking at it for a few minutes, I decided that C7 of the Tokyo apatosaurine was such a good match for the Salt Wash specimen that I wanted to know what it would look like if it was similarly sectioned by erosion. In the Salt Wash specimen, the prezygs are sticking out a little farther than the condyle and cervical rib sections. The red line in this figure is my best attempt at mimicking that erosional surface on the Tokyo C7, and the black outlines on the right are my best guess as to what would be exposed by such a cut (or pair of cuts). I’ve never seen NSMT-PV 20375 in person, so this is just an estimate, but I don’t think it can be too inaccurate, and it is a pretty good match for the Salt Wash specimen.
Another way to put it: if this is an apatosaurine, everything fits. Even the wide-but-not-low-hanging cervical ribs are reasonable in light of some other apatosaurines. If we think this is Camarasaurus just because the cervical ribs aren’t low-hanging, then the pneumatic complexity, the height of the prezygs, and the ventrolateral process on the cervical rib are all anomalous. The balance of the evidence says that this is an apatosaurine, either a small, anterior vert from a big one, or possibly something farther back from a small one. And that’s pretty satisfying.
One more thing: can we take a moment to stand in awe of this freaking thumb-sized cobble that presumably got inside the vertebra through one its pneumatic foramina and rattled around until it got up inside the condyle? Where, I’ll note, the internal structure looks pretty intact despite being filled with just, like, gravel. As someone who spends an inordinate amount of time thinking about how pneumatic vertebrae get buried and fossilized, I am blown away by this. Gaze upon its majesty, people!
This is another “Road to Jurassic Reimagined, Part 2″ post. As before, Part 1 is here, Part 2 will be going up here in the near future. As always, stay tuned.
References
- Upchurch, P., Tomida, Y., and Barrett, P.M. 2005. A new specimen of Apatosaurus ajax (Sauropoda: Diplodocidae) from the Morrison Formation (Upper Jurassic) of Wyoming, USA. National Science Museum Monographs No. 26. Tokyo. ISSN 1342-9574.
- Wedel, M.J., and Sanders, R.K. 2002. Osteological correlates of cervical musculature in Aves and Sauropoda (Dinosauria: Saurischia), with comments on the cervical ribs of Apatosaurus. PaleoBios 22(3):1-6.
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 
