Having spent much of the last few days playing with the cervical vertebrae of a subadult apatosaur, and trying to make sense of those of the mounted adult, neck ontogeny is much on our minds. Here’s an example from the less charismatic half of Saurischia.

Mike’s and Matt’s excellent adventure in Pittsburgh continues! Today was Day 4, and just as yesterday offered us a unique opportunity to see the mounted Dipodocus and Apatosaurus skeletons up close on a lift, so today we got to look the two mounts from directly above!

Left to right: Allosaurus fragilis , Apatosaurus louisae , Homo sapiens , Diplodocus carnegii .

Separated at birth. Left: Apatosaurus lousiae holotype CM 2018, cast skull associated with specimen. Right: Matt Wedel. Scientists have long wondered how such a bloated beast could etc. etc.

Matt and I have completed Day 2 of our excursion to the Carnegie Musuem in Pittsburgh. Day 1 was spent in the public galleries, because collections aren’t open on Sunday, but today we got into the Big Bone room.

(Matt’s photo, taken in the public gallery of the Carnegie Museum.)

No time for a long post today, but there are a couple of cool developments I wanted to let you know about. The folks at the Barnes & Noble Settlers Ridge store in Pittsburgh got in touch and asked if I’d give a short talk and do a book signing while I’m in town.

As noted in the last post, Matt and I are off to spend a week at the Carnegie Museum from 11th-15th March. We expect to see many, many fascinating specimens there: far more than we’ll be able to do proper work on in the five days we have.

Hot news! Matt and I will be spending the week of 11th-15th March at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh: the home of the world’s two most definitive sauropods!

Thanks to a comment from long-time reader Andrew Stuck, I realised he is also the tweeter @dinodadreviews, who pointed us to Xenoposeidon in a kids’ book. Now, a review on his website of Ted Rechlin‘s comic-book Jurassic has pointed me to what I think is the first depiction of the BRONTOSMASH!

Darren covered this briefly on the Scientific American version of Tetrapod Zoology, but the photos seem to have gone down and who knows how much longer any of that stuff will be up. Plus, he had other things to discuss, so the story has never been told in its entirety. This happened back in April, 2014.