After P.A.S.T president Gilles Danis commented on our post about the Chicago airport Brachiosaurus mount, I got into an interesting email conversation with him. Here, posted with his kind permission and only lightly edited, are his thoughts on the Brachiosaurus mount.
Continuing with what seems to have turned out to be Brachiosaur Humerus Week here on SV-POW! (part 1, part 2, part 3), let’s consider the oft-stated idea that brachiosaurs have the most slender humeri of any sauropod.
Last time we looked at the humeri in the Field Museum’s mounted Brachiosaurus skeleton — especially the right humerus, which is a cast from the holotype, while the left is a sculpture.
As we noted yesterday, the humerus of the Brachiosaurus altithorax holotype FMNH P25107 is inconveniently embedded in a plaster jacket — but it wasn’t always. That’s very strange. I have an idea about that which I’ll come to later. Anyway, although the humerus is now half in a jacket and fully inside a cabinet, we can see it from all angles thanks to the cast that’s part of the mounted skeleton outside the Field Museum.
In the comments on Matt’s post about the giant new Argentine titanosaur specimens, Ian Corfe wondered why Benson et al. (2014) estimated the circumference of the humerus of Brachiosaurus altithorax instead of just measuring it. (Aside: I can’t find that data in their paper.
You’ve probably seen a lot of yapping in the news about a new “world’s largest dinosaur”, with the standard photos of people lying down next to unfeasibly large bones. Here’s my favorite–various versions of it have been making the rounds, but I grabbed this one from Nima’s post on his blog, The Paleo King.
{.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-10328 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“10328” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2014/05/19/the-holotype-dorsal-vertebra-of-dystylosaurus/olympus-digital-camera-13/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/utah-2008-05-25-006-dystylo-dorsal-full.jpg” orig-size=“1200,1600” comments-opened=“1”
{.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-10310 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“10310” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2014/05/15/local-author-book-signing-at-the-san-bernardino-county-museum-this-sunday/vicki-with-book/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/vicki-with-book.jpg” orig-size=“900,1200” comments-opened=“1”
“In the public interest” is an article that was published in C&RL News back in July/August 2005. It’s Sharon Terry’s first-person account of being the parent of children with a pseudoxanthoma elasticum (PXE), a genetic disease.
{.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-10286 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“10286” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2014/05/10/poetry-for-paleontologists-in-memoriam-a-h-h-canto-123-by-alfred-lord-tennyson/salton-sea-sunset/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/salton-sea-sunset.jpg” orig-size=“2816,2112” comments-opened=“1” image-meta=“{"aperture":"5.6","credit":"","camera":"Canon PowerShot
On Monday we visited the Prehistoric Museum in Price, Utah, the Cleveland-Lloyed dinosaur quarry, and sites in the Mussentuchit member of the Cedar Mountain Formation. Many thanks to Marc Jones for the photos.