Most dinosaurs are elegant animals. Tyrannosaurs are elegant biting machines. Chasmosaurs are elegent. Brachiosaurs are hella elegant. Even ankylosaurs have their own robust elegance. And then there’s Camptosaurus . Why do you have to be so lumpen? What’s your head doing down there? What the heck are your ilia doing up there? What are they even supposed to be, TV aerials?

A few sauropods have bifurcated cervical ribs. The most dramatic example that I know of is the turiasaur Moabosaurus (Britt et al. 2017). Mike and I got to see that material on the Sauropocalypse back in 2016, which is how we got the photo above.

On the excellent and convivial social network Mastodon, someone going by the handle “gay ornithopod” asked what turned out to be a fascinating question: My first response was that we can only say it’s not unusual for extant animals to change colour through ontogeny, so the null hypothesis would have to be that at least some sauropods (and other dinosaurs) did the same. But I don’t think we have any information on the specific coloration.

Brian Curtice, a long-time sauropod jockey who now runs Fossil Crates, was briefly in Price, Utah, last Friday to drop off an Eilenodon skull at the Prehistoric Museum. While he was there he snapped some photos of a new “Dippy” exhibition — reproduced here with permission. The entrance to the exhibition.

…that we have somehow managed to not blog about yet. It’s figured by Foster et al. (2018: fig. 18E-F), which is a free download at the link below. Foster et al. referred it and the other Mygatt-Moore apatosaurine material to Apatosaurus louisae , which I’ve always thought was a reasonable move. More on this and other apatosaurine vertebrae in the future.

Mike D’Emic’s new paper The evolution of maximum terrestrial body mass in sauropod dinosaurs is out! Yay! Relevant to our interests! Obviously I want to read this paper, so I simply … 1. Go to the paper’s page at Current Biology . 2. It’s paywalled. 3. There is a “Log in” option at top right, but it’s only for an account specific to … what? This journal? This publisher? 4. Find another copy at Science Direct.

Brian Curtice and Colin Boisvert are presenting our talk on this project at 2:00 pm MDT this afternoon, at the 14th Symposium on Mesozoic Terrestrial Ecosystems and Biota (MTE14) in Salt Lake City, and the related paper is in the MTE14 volume in The Anatomical Record.

As described in the last post, Jessie Atterholt is presenting our poster on this project today, at the 14th Symposium on Mesozoic Terrestrial Ecosystems and Biota (MTE14) in Salt Lake City, and the related paper is in the MTE14 volume in The Anatomical Record.

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This is one of those things I’ve always done, that I’ve never thought to ask if others did. When you’re putting together a talk, or making a complicated figure, do you storyboard it first with a pen or pencil? I usually do, and have done since I started way back when.

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