Dino dig birthday cake
June 5, 2022
One of the benefits of being me is that my friends often make me cool dino-themed stuff for my birthday (f’rinstance). This year, it was this dinosaur dig cake from my friend Jenny Adams. Yes, it’s a vulgar, overstudied theropod,* but I take the requisite amount of joy from how thoroughly blown apart its skeleton is. Plus, the skull and cervicals are pneumatic (in vivo, if not in choco), so it’s a least plausibly interesting (i.e., not an ornithopod), and it looks cool (i.e., not Camarasaurus).
*I’m morally obligated to thank Paul Barrett for this wonderful phrase, which I use pretty much every chance I get.
Should you want to replicate this glycemic index Chicxulub, here’s the stratigraphic breakdown, starting from the bedrock (bedchoc?):
- base layer is a regular chocolate cake,
- but with added chocolate chips,
- topped with vanilla frosting, to hold down:
- a whole package of Oreos crumbled into faux dirt
- surrounding the vanilla-flavored white chocolate dinosaur bones
Jenny made the dino bones using a set of (new, clean) plastic sand molds, like these:
You can find a zillion like ’em online by searching for ‘dinosaur sand toys’ or ‘dinosaur sand mold’.
Anyway, I can report that the excavation has been most enjoyable, but with about half the ‘quarry’ left to explore, the number of fossils recovered intact continues to hover near zero — we’ve been grinding them up to use as dietary supplements. Good thing it’s just a theropod!
“Scaled beasts” Giraffatitan skull
November 22, 2021
Back in June, I saw a series of tweets by sculptor and digital artist Ruadhrí Brennan, showing off the work he’d been doing on sculpting brachiosaurid skulls: Giraffatitan, Brachiosaurus (based on the Felch Quarry skull USNM 5730) and Europasaurus. Impressed, I asked if he would send a Giraffatitan skull, and here it is!
You can immediately see two things: one, it’s good. (I’ll have more to say about this.) And second, it’s small, It’s leaned up against a stack of smallish coins in this photo, to give me the true lateral perspective I wanted, and those coins (10p, 20p, 20p, 5p) also make a decent ad-hoc scalebar.
In fact, it’s sculpted at 1:10 scale — about 9 cm from the tip of the premaxilla to the rearmost projection of the parietals, implying about 90 cm total length for the skull MB.R.2223.1 (“t 1”) — a figure surprisingly difficult to find in the literature (can anyone help?) but consonant with how big it seems in real life.
At that scale, the detail is pretty amazing. Its not just that the overall proportions of the skull are so true, but the visible junctions between the bones — as for example between the paired ascending processes of the two premaxilae, as apparent in anterior view — but the texture of the bone, including things like vascular foramina for the lips but also just straight-up bone surface. It’s a lovely job.
This view is a pretty good match for what we used in the second Shedloads of Awesome post back in 2008 — in fact, let’s just put them side by side so we can compare more easily.
As you can see, I slightly muffed the photography of the model — I could do a better job of matching the aspect I tried. But we’re in the ballpark, and it’s easy to see from this angle how much the model skull really couldn’t be anything other than what it is. That said, there are a few places where it seems the bone junctions don’t quite match those of the real skull. Most obviously, in the real skull the lacrimal seems to laterally overlap the nasal dorsally and the maxilla/jugal ventrally, whereas in the model it fits in more neatly with both. But I am inclined to think this is not so much a mistake as a correction to allow for poor articulation and distortion in the original — a restoration, in other words.
Here’s a different oblique view:
The story here really is just what an odd shape this familiar skull is when viewed in this perspective, and a valuable reminder that we should all try to avoid getting too suckered in by the over-familiar lateral views of various things. 3D objects are weird. They trick you. That’s why, for example, two scapulae that look very different in photos might actually be very similar in reality: the difference is in the angle of the photograph, not in the photographed bones.
Anyway, moving on from that cautionary tale …
The key takeaway is really just that this Giraffatitan skull is very nice, and it leaves me wishing I also had the Camarsaurus one for comparison … even though camarsaurs are ugly and stupid.
Oh, what’s that you say? You want a Giraffatitan skull of your very own? Well, you can have one: get it from the Scaled Beasts shop!
The Nanoblock Brachiosaurus
May 2, 2020
My eldest son Dan went out to visit his girlfriend Beth, shortly before the Coronavirus crisis began, during her university placement in Toulouse. While they were there, they bought me this gift:
As you can see, it’s a Lego-like self-assembly kit; but as you can also see from the mug in the background, it’s tiny. As best I can make out, the blocks are half the length and width of Lego blocks, and about third the height. The whole model is about seven or eight inches (18-20 cm) from nose to tail.
Here’s a very quick walk-round, so you can appreciate the 3d shape.
I am properly impressed with this. It has the shape of the ribcage right, and the hips and shoulders, and the proportions are right so that it conveys with absolute conviction the quality of brachiosaurosity. It has a very posable neck that can be placed in a realistic life posture, and there are even hints of scapulae and ilia.
I made only one change from the instructions: I reoriented the forefoot so that we have a vertically oriented arcade of metacarpals rather than a plantigrade forefoot.
It was a very picky build. The instructions recommend using Nanoblock tweezers, sold separately, but I just used my big clumsy fingers, so that ribs and legs and things were constantly falling off. The process was rather like what this video shows, but much slower.
If you want one of your own, you can get it from Amazon UK or from Amazon US. I recommend it for serious sauropod lovers, but would be infuriating for children, and requires patience and precision to assemble.
Oh, and kit came with plenty of spare parts, in case you lose some of them: enough that Dan was able to make a juvenile with the leftovers.
Turns out that if Mike and I don’t post about sauropods for a while, people start doing it for us! This very interesting project by Tom Johnson of Loveland, Colorado, first came to my attention when Tom emailed Mark Hallett about it and Mark kindly passed it on to me. I got in touch with Tom and asked if he’d be interested in writing it up for SV-POW!, and here it is. Many thanks to Tom for his willingness to share his work with us. Enjoy! – Matt Wedel
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The sauropod formerly known as Apatosaurus in the American Museum of Natural History was the first permanently mounted sauropod dinosaur in the world, and for many years, the most famous (Brinkman 2010). The greater part of the skeleton consists of the specimen AMNH 460 from the Nine Mile Crossing Quarry north of Como Bluff, Wyoming, supplemented with bones from other AMNH specimens from Como Bluff, Bone Cabin Quarry, and with plaster casts of the forelimbs of the holotype specimen of Brontosaurus excelsus (YPM 1980) at the Yale Peabody Museum.
A herd of Brontosaurus skeleton models parading before four box covers issued between the 1950s and 1990s.
Like many aging boomer dinophiles, my dinosaur epiphany was the result of books, movies, and toys available in the 1950s, but especially a series of plastic model dinosaur skeletons that appeared around 1958. The Brontosaurus was my personal favorite, and, like the Tyrannosaurus and Stegosaurus models in the series, was very obviously based on the AMNH mount. The models were reissued at least three times over the years and can still be found either “mint in box” or more often in various stages of completion.
Apatosaurus lousiae 1/12 scale skeleton, modelled by Phil Platt, assembled and photographed by Brant Bassam. Image courtesy of BrantWorks.com.
The crème de la crème today, of course, is the 1:12 scale Apatosaurus skeleton model by Phil Platt, available from Gaston Design in Fruita, Colorado. A particularly nice example is the one completed and mounted by Brant Bassam of BrantWorks. The Platt skeleton is a replica in the true sense of the word. The plastic models are pretty crude in comparison, as cool as they appeared to us as kids.
I was interested in skeletal illustrations I have seen of Tyrannosaurus rex, which compare the completeness of various specimens by showing the actual bones included by coloring them red. A 2005 study of Apatosaurus by Upchurch et. al. examined eleven of the most complete Apatosaurus individuals, and I was interested to see the actual bones known for each specimen. Using published descriptions, red markers, and copies of a skeletal silhouette of Apatosaurus (permission obtained from the artist), I prepared a comparison of the most completely known Apatosaurus specimens. It was clear, of course, that Apatosaurus louisae (CM 3018) is the most complete specimen of the Apatosaurus/Brontosaurus group. But it also was apparent that old AMNH 460 included a substantial portion of the skeleton, even if it is a composite.
I grabbed some additional markers and, using the illustration of the mount in William Diller Matthew’s popular book Dinosaurs (Matthew 1915, fig. 20, which I trust is in the public domain by now), I color-coded the bones according to the composition as listed in Matthew’s (1905) article:
- AMNH 460, Nine-Mile Crossing Quarry: 5th, 6th, 8th to 13th cervical vertebrae; 1st to 9th dorsal; 3rd to 19th caudal; all ribs; both coracoids; “parts of” sacrum and ilia; both ischia and pubes; left femur and astragalus; and “part of” the left fibula. RED
- AMNH 222, Como Bluff: right scapula, 10th dorsal vertebra, right femur and tibia. GREEN
(Visitors to AMNH: you can see the rest of AMNH 222 under the feet of the hunched-over Allosaurus) - AMNH 339, Bone Cabin Quarry: 20th to 40th caudal vertebrae. LIGHT BLUE
- AMNH 592, Bone Cabin Quarry: metatarsals of the right hind foot. VIOLET
- YPM 1980, Como Bluff: left scapula, forelimb long bones (casts). YELLOW
- The remaining parts of the skeleton are either modeled in plaster or are unspecified (“a few toe bones”). BLACK
It occurred to me that I might have sufficient spare parts of old ITC and Glencoe Brontosaurus models to create a three-dimensional version. I did, and painting prior to assembly definitely made the job easier.
There are obviously limitations to using Matthew’s (1915) reconstruction (e.g., only 13 cervicals) and the model (12 cervicals). It is also not clear from Matthew’s description how much of the sacrum and ilia were restored. Nevertheless, the painted model does provide a colorful, if crude, visualization of the composition of the composite.
Here are some more photos of the finished product:
A view from the front of the model, compared with a historical AMNH photo of the forelimbs and pelvic girdle.
Long considered a specimen of Brontosaurus excelsus or Apatosaurus excelsus, AMNH 460 was referred to Apatosaurus ajax by Upchurch et. al. in 2005. In the most comprehensive analysis of diplodocid phylogeny to date, Tschopp et. al. (2015) found AMNH 460 to be an “indeterminate apatosaurine” pending a “detailed analysis of the specimen.” What to call it? Oh, yeah, that’s been covered in another post!
This is a nostalgia shot for the old brontophiles. Notice that the Triceratops is entering the lake for a swim!
Tom Johnson with the mounted skeleton of Amphicyon, a Miocene “bear-dog”,
in the Raymond Alf Museum of Paleontology in Claremont, California.
References
- Brinkman , Paul D. (2010). The Second Jurassic Dinosaur Rush, University of Chicago Press, 2010.
- Matthew, William Diller, (1905). “The Mounted Skeleton of Brontosaurus,” The American Museum Journal, Vol. V, No. 2, April.
- Matthew, W.D. (1915). Dinosaurs, With Special Reference to the American Museum Collections, American Museum of Natural History, New York.
- Tschopp, Emanuel, Octávio Mateus, and Roger Benson. (2015). “A Specimen-Level Phylogenetic Analysis and Taxonomic Revision of Diplodocidae (Dinosauria, Sauropoda).” Ed. Andrew Farke. PeerJ 3 (2015): e857.
- Upchurch, P., Tomida, Y., 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 (Tokyo) 26 (118): 1–156.
A beautiful Lego Diplodocus skeleton
June 18, 2014
Check out this beautiful Lego Diplodocus:
(Click through for the full image at full size.)
I particularly like the little touch of having of bunch of Lego Victorian gentleman scientists clustered around it, though they’re probably a bit too big for the skeleton.
This is the work of MolochBaal, and all rights are reserved. You can see five more views of this model in his Flickr gallery. I especially admire how he’s managed to get the vertebral transitions pretty smooth, the careful use of separate radius/ulna and tibia/fibula, and the use of a transparent brick in the skull to represent the antorbital fenestra.
The forefeet are wrong — their toes should not be splayed out — but you can’t blame MolochBaal for that, as he was copying the mounted CM 84/94 cast in the Madrid museum.
Photography and illustration talk, Part 3: Backdrops and lighting
February 11, 2014
Somewhat lamely, this is the only slide I had in about lighting. I left it up while I talked about the most important points, which are:
- Don’t use a flash unless you absolutely have to.
- If you can swing it, the common convention is to have specimens illuminated from the upper left.*
- If you have the time, it’s not a bad idea to bracket your Goldilocks shot with brighter and darker photos, by fiddling with your camera settings.
* I happily violate this convetion if illumination from another angle shows the specimen to better advantage–and if I have any control over illumination. Working with big bones in some collections, you basically have overhead florescent lights and that’s it. The NHM shot above may look not-so-hot, but there we at least had a desk lamp we could move around. In a lot of places I’ve worked, I didn’t have even that.
The other posts in this series are here.
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:
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 
