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.

Here’s a piece of signage from the wonderful Dinosaur National Monument, which we visited on the 2016 Sauropocalypse.

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! The first column shows the specimen numbers as used in Jensen (1985), and last column contains Jensen’s own assignments except where noted.

I got a wonderful surprise a couple of nights ago!

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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.

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We have summer-house in the garden, divided into two rooms.

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.