My adventures with Tri-bear-atops
June 7, 2026
One month ago this weekend, I was at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History to yap about horned dinosaurs, a tie-in to the new Bizarre Headgear exhibit. Some utter genius in the gift shop had set up what you see above: a Triceratops mask on a stuffed polar bear. This charmed me immensely, in part because it reminded me of one of my favorite memes:
That image lives rent-free in my head forever.
Tri-bear-atops also reminded me of Natalie Metzger’s squirrel wearing an Aquilops skull, a signed print of which lives rent-free in my office. (BTW this print and many other awesome things are available in Natalie’s shop at The Fuzzy Slug. Incidentally, I got to meet Natalie at NorWesCon 2018 and she is just as awesome and hilarious in person as you’d expect from her art. I myself am just as forgetful and procrastinatory as you’d expect from an 8-year-overdue endorsement.)
I loved Tri-bear-atops so much I put it in my talk, at the end when I was encouraging folks to see the whole museum and patronize the gift shop. I said in the talk — truthfully! — that I would have bought it but it wouldn’t fit in my carry-on, so someone else should do the right thing.
That advice landed closer than I expected — my brother Ryan and his family surprised me with it for my birthday! Not a recreation, not “inspired by”, they just went back to the museum and bought the OG Tri-bear-atops and socked it away for a month. A special shout-out to my nephew Eli, who bought the Triceratops mask with his own money, and who (in classic older brother fashion) assures me that his siblings Jewel and Isaac had nothing to do with it.
I feel like the genre of dinosaur-masks-on-things-that-aren’t-dinosaurs has legs. Chances are good that you’ll see more here in time.
Get ready to scroll.
In 2017, Wollaton Hall in Nottinghamshire hosted an exhibition, Dinosaurs Of China: Ground Shakers To Feathered Flyers. Wollaton Hall Curator Adam Smith arranged for the SVPCA attendees to visit the exhibition after the conference as a “field trip”. Needless to say, the star of the show for me was the rearing cast skeleton of Mamenchisaurus hochuanensis. But it’s so tall, it’s very hard to photograph well.
While we were there, Matt took a a lot of photos of this skeleton, and among them were several sequences showing the Mamenchisaurus from head to tail. Moving with my usual haste, it took me only nine short years to do something with these.
And by “do something”, what I mean is “ask someone else to do something”. Specifically, I sent the best sequence to Jarrod Davis, a very old friend of Matt’s and an Emmy-award winning visual effects specialist. And I asked him — as we have done before — to use his skills to stitch the sequence together. The result is the photo above.
It’s high resolution (3171 x 7931 pixels), so here’s how I recommend viewing. Click through to the full-sized image. Put your browser into full-screen mode. Adjust the scaling so the image fits the width of the screen. Then just enjoy scrolling through that long, long neck.
My deep gratitude to Jarrod for doing the work on this, and to Matt for taking the original photos. The image is destined for a paper that I’m working on, but it was just too good not to share with y’all.
I want to get this printed out extra-large and attach it to the wall of my office, ceiling-to-floor.
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 