I’ve been on vacation for a couple of weeks, hence the radio silence here at SV-POW! after the flood of Supersaurus posts and Matt’s new paper on aberrant nerves in human legs.

The image I put together explaining the new discovery. Modified from Staples et al. (2019: fig. 6). Today sees the publication of a new paper, “Cutaneous branch of the obturator nerve extending to the medial ankle and foot: a report of two cadaveric cases,” by Brittany Staples, Edward Ennedy, Tae Kim, Steven Nguyen, Andrew Shore, Thomas Vu, Jonathan Labovitz, and yours truly.

The history of Supersaurus — and its buddies Ultrasauros and Dystylosaurus — is pretty complicated, and there seems to be no one source for it. But having read a lot about these animals in the process of writing eleven mostly pretty substantial posts about them, I feel like I’m starting to put it all together. This post is an attempt at recognising the landmarks in this history, in chronological order.

Here’s a piece of signage from the wonderful Dinosaur National Monument, which we visited on the 2016 Sauropocalypse. And in close-up: This is the first and only time I’ve been encouraged to touch real dinosaur bones on the basis that a cast of them was too fragile.

Back in 2005, three years before their paper on the WDC Supersaurus known as Jimbo was published, Lovelace at al. presented their work as a poster at the annual SVP meeting.

I keep wishing there was a single place out there where I could look up Jensen’s old BYU specimen numbers for Supersaurus, Ultrasaurus and Dystylosaurus elements, and find the modern equivalents, or vice versa. Then I realised there’s no reason not to just make one. So here goes!

I got a wonderful surprise a couple of nights ago!

My friend and frequent collaborator Jessie Atterholt has her office in the next building over from mine. When you walk in, you see something that looks approximately like this.

One of the strange things about Jensen’s 1985 paper is that the abstract implies that he informally considered the Ultrasauros scapulocoracoid to be the type specimen.

Poor Dystylosaurus. Always the bridesmaid. No-one seems to care much about it, yet the one and only vertebra that bears that name is the single most diagnostic elements out of all the individual bones that have been assigned to Supersaurus over the years.

This is a Galeamopus, roughly two feet long, sculpted by James Herrmann (who also made the life-size Aquilops sculpture and bust) for the Cincinnati Museum Center. Here’s what it looks like on the other side. From behind. And from the front. I dig this.