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.

We have summer-house in the garden, divided into two rooms. One of the rooms functions as a shed: Among the many things in that shed, there’s some light scaffolding which we’ve used to paint the back of the house.

Since the previous installment of this epic, we’ve taken two brief digressions on how little importance we should attach the colours of bones in our photographs when trying to determine whether they’re from the same individual: cameras do lie, and in any case different bones of the same individual can age differently.

I’ll see your face-of-the-blessed-virgin-in-a-waffle and raise you the fourth dorsal vertebra of the Giraffatitan brancai paralectotype BM.R.2181 (formerly HMN S II) in a dandelion leaf: I saw this lying on the ground as my friend Nataley was playing a short set at a festival, and it immediately made me think of this:

Last time, I noted that photographs of the exact same object, even under the same lighting conditions, can come out different colours.

In part 5 of the Supersaurus series, I made the point that my photos of Scap A and Scap B seem to show them as being very different colours, suggesting different preservation. However … I don’t trust that line of evidence as much as I might for two reasons.

When I started this series, it wasn’t going to be a series at all. I thought it was going to be a single post, hence the title that refers to all three of Jensen’s 1985 sauropods even though most of the posts so far have been only about Supersaurus.

Before we get on to the home stretch of this series — which is turning out waaay longer than I expected it to be, and which I guess should really have been a paper instead — we need to resolve an important detail.

You may recall that sculptor James Herrmann did a life-size bronze of Aquilops (shown above) back in 2017.