Last Friday night I was at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History to talk about horned dinosaurs, for the launch of the “Bizarre Headgear” exhibit. But last Saturday I was there for “Curiousiday”, to talk about Sauroposeidon.
I was set up at the south end of the museum’s main hall, with a table and some specimens to show off. On the left here is a 1/8 scale 3D print of OMNH 53062, the holotype cervical vertebrae of Sauroposeidon. On the right is OMNH 1094, a cervical vertebra of Apatosaurus (or the giant Oklahoma apatosaurine) that was the first thing that Kent Sanders and I CT scanned back in the spring of 1998 after the vertebrae of what would become Sauroposeidon. And on the far right is a monitor showing the three best slices, a version of an image that I’ve used in many papers and blog posts, going all the way back to Tutorial 3 in the fall of 2007. Good old OMNH 1094 must surely rival OMNH 53062 as my most-figured specimen. I should tally up the occurrences and see who’s ahead.
Anyway: back to Sauroposeidon! Just outside the frame of the previous photo, the two larger jackets were on display, holding what I thought back when were cervicals 6, 7, and 8. That was based on a brachiosaurid identification, and a conservative estimate of 13 cervicals. Now it seems much more likely that Sauroposeidon is some kind of somphospondyl, and possibly a basal titanosaur. If so, it could have had anywhere from 13 to 17 cervicals, and there’s really no telling which four we have, other than they are probably from near the middle of the neck.
I believe that this is the first time that the original fossil material of Sauroposeidon has been on public display. Pretty darned cool! I got to show them off to a lot of visitors, and point out all kinds of neat anatomical details, like the numerous pneumatic fossae and subfossae and the overlapping cervical ribs.
And here I am yapping about Sauroposeidon, in a photo by curator Jacqueline Lungmus. Sauroposeidon-philes will recognize the slide as the quarry map, which appeared as figure 7 in Wedel & Cifelli (2005).
I love the composition of this photo, also by Jac Lungmus, in which the reconstructed neck and skull of Sauroposeidon loom overhead while I talk about the discovery of Sauroposeidon next to the actual fossils of Sauroposeidon and a 3D print of the Sauroposeidon vertebrae. More Sauroposeidon, anyone?
No? Okay, here’s a bunch of Aquilops stuff at the vertebrate paleontology table, including a cast of the actual fossil and a reconstructed skull, alongside the by-now-classic Brian Engh art and a couple of stills from Jurassic World Rebirth. There were many more goodies on display on the VP table, including casts of bones from Allosaurus anax (formerly Saurophaganax) and the Oklahoma Deinonychus.
I have skipped a ton of stuff that happened at Curiousiday. I believe every department in the museum had a table set up, except maybe genomics. The place was packed with cool stuff and interested visitors. Many thanks to Jac Lungmus, Jen Larsen, Kyle Davies, Greg Wilbert, Anne Seagren, and everyone else who made my fun day possible!
In a comment on the previous post, llewelly asked about a dinoceratan on display in the Bizarre Headgear exhibit. Here you go. Unfortunately I didn’t get a pic of the signage, so I’m not sure which taxon this is (Uintatherium? Eobasileus?), or which artist made the sculpture. Most of the sculptures in the exhibit are by Shane Foulkes. If anyone knows, sing out in the comments and I’ll update the post accordingly.
Finally, for the first time in nearly a decade, Giant Irish Matt has been spotted in its natural habitat (= inside a museum, natch). This pathetic freak is clearly bound for extinction.
For my birthday this year, my wife bought me the newish Lego kit Natural History Museum 10326. (Well: actually she bought me a Chinese knock-off for 1/3 the price, but that’s not the point.) It’s a lovely kit and I had a great time building it.
One of the exhibits that you build for the museum is a sauropod skeleton — recognizably a brachiosaur. But as previously documented on this blog, I also have a much larger Lego brachiosaur, built from the piece of the kit Dinosaur Fossils 21320. (That one was also a present from Fiona!)
Here they are, side by side.
So which brachiosaur is more accurately to scale?
Lego is often considered to be in 42:1 scale, based on minifigure height of about 4 cm relative to a typical adult human height of about 1.68 m. (5 feet 6 inches).
I measured the big brachiosaur at 37 cm high from the top of its plinth to the top of the head. At 42:1 scale, that’s 15.54 m. The smaller one is 15 cm tall from plinth to head, which at 42:1 scale is 6.30 m.
The real Giraffatitan mount in the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin is 13.27 m tall (Taylor and Wedel 2013: caption to figure 1). That means that the larger of the two Lego models is much closer to being the right size, relative to the minifigs, than the small one is.
But wait: famously, the Giraffatitan fibula HMN XV2 is 134 cm long compared with 119 cm for the fibula of HMN SII (= MB.R.2181, the mounted specimen) (Janensch 1961: table 16). That’s 1.126 times as long, which indicates it belonged to an animal that stood 13.27 x 1.126 = 14.94 m tall.
That’s 96% the scaled size of the Lego Giraffatitan — which, given the hand-waving involved in the various scalings here, is as near to identical as makes no difference.
In conclusion, m’lud, the large Lego Giraffatitan in the photo above is almost exactly the right size for the largest known individual of that genus, relative to the minifigs and indeed the actual museum.
References
- Janensch, Werner. 1961. Die Gliedmaszen und Gliedmaszengurtel der Sauropoden der Tendaguru-Schichten. Palaeontographica, suppl. 7(3):177-235.
- Taylor, Michael P., and Mathew J. Wedel. 2013c. The effect of intervertebral cartilage on neutral posture and range of motion in the necks of sauropod dinosaurs. PLOS ONE 8(10):e78214. 17 pages. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0078214
Back in 2010, I wrote about early artistic depictions of Brachiosaurus (including Giraffatitan). There, I wrote of the iconic mount MB.R.2181 (then HMN S II):
When the mount was completed, shortly before the start of World War II, it was unveiled against a backdrop of Nazi banners. I have not been able to find a photograph of this (and if anyone has one, please do let me know), but I do have this drawing of the event, taken from an Italian magazine and dated 23rd December 1937.
(See that post for the drawing.)
Recently the historian Ilja Nieuwland (one of the authors on our recent paper on the Carnegie Diplodocus, Taylor et al. 2025) sent me two photos of this unveiling, again with swastikas prominent in the background:
EEN MOOIE AANSWINST — voor het museum van natuurlijke historie te Berlijn: het skelet van een Brachiosaurus, het grooste voorwereld-lijke landdier ooit gevonden. Het skelet is 11.87 meter hoog.
Surprisingly, perhaps, this is in a Dutch newspaper, Haagsche Courant of 14 December 1937. The caption, which is in Dutch, reads: “A GREAT ADDITION — to the Museum of Natural History in Berlin: the skeleton of a Brachiosaurus, the largest prehistoric land animal ever found. The skeleton is 11.87 meters tall.” Ilja helpfully supplied a PDF containing the front page of the newspaper and the page that contained this image.
The second is similar, but from a different angle that highlights the human skeleton that was placed down by the forefeet for scale:
EEN PRAEHISTORISCH MONSTER werd ongeveer zeven jaar geleden door een Duitsch geleerde in Oost-Africa ontdekt. Na moeizamen arbeid is men er in geslaagd het skelet van den brachiosaurus op te bouwen, dat in ‘n museum te Berlijn is opgesteld
Again, this is in Dutch, and the filename suggests that the source is a newspaper called Maasbode for 27 November 1937. The caption reads: “A PREHISTORIC MONSTER was discovered about seven years ago by a German scientist in East Africa. After arduous work, they succeeded in reconstructing the skeleton of the brachiosaurus, which is on display in a museum in Berlin.”
I don’t know about you, but I feel it as a gut-punch when I see this animal, which I deeply love, against a backdrop of Nazi symbols. Gerhard Maier’s usually very detailed book African Dinosaurs Unearthed (Maier 2003) is uncharacteristically terse about this, saying of the unveiling only this (on page 267):
With swastika banners hanging from the walls as a backdrop, the exciting new exhibit opened in August 1937. A curious public, especially schoolchildren, formed long lines, waiting to see Berlin’s latest attraction.
I don’t know to what extent the rising Nazi regime used the brachiosaur mount as a PR event, an advertisement for their national superiority or what have you. (Has anyone written about this?)
I was thinking about this because I get a daily notification of Wikipedia’s most-viewed article of the previous 24 hours. In recent times, it’s mostly been some article about bad news, or a person causing bad news. But a couple of days ago, it was Artemis II, and I remarked on Mastodon how nice it was, just for one day, to have good news as the most read article. And someone quickly replied “I love space exploration, but having the Trump administration take credit for something like this is the last thing we need.”
But here’s the thing. The Berlin brachiosaur mount has long outlived the Nazis (or at least the OG Nazis). And whatever the current moon mission achieves will long outlive the Trump administration.
We don’t really write about politics on this blog. I like that about it, and I’m guessing most readers do as well. I’m not going to change that — the Web is full of places to go and read about politics. But I do like the sense that scientific achievements are outside of the particular people who happen to be in power when they happen. The Berlin brachiosaur, and the Artemis II moon mission, are achievements for all humankind.
References
- Maier, Gerhard. 2003. African Dinosaurs Unearthed: The Tendaguru Expeditions. Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 380 p.
- Taylor, Michael P., Amy C. Henrici, Linsly J. Church, Ilja Nieuwland and Matthew C. Lamanna. 2025. The history and composition of the Carnegie Diplodocus. Annals of the Carnegie Museum 91(1):55–91. doi:10.2992/007.091.0104
More on that “Ultrasaurus” scap photo
November 13, 2025
Three weeks ago, I posted three colour photos of the “Ultrasaurus” excavation at the Dry Mesa Quarry, provided by Tyler Holmes from an old dinosaur encyclopedia. Here’s the third one again:
The scapula of Ultrasaurus being excavated.
[caption from original book.]
I wrote:
This can’t be right. In [another photo], which definitely is the “Ultrasauros” scap, the glenoid is facing clockwise if you think of the whole bone as being able to rotate about its midpoint; but in this photo it must be facing anticlockwise at top left. So I conclude it’s one of the Supersaurus scaps — either the left in lateral view or the right in medial.
Several people (Llewelly, Adam Yates, Matt) disagreed, and thought this was indeed the “Ultrasaurus” scap, but that the photo had been left-right reversed.
Brian Curtice weighed in by email, which I will quote.
Hola!
I was asked to identify which specimen is in those color photos. The scap is BYU 9462, the brach scapulocoracoid that Jensen referred to Ultrasauros.
I suspect the area added around the scapula in the left photo was an attempt to preserve the sides. BYU 9462, as shown in the picture of the original, is quite fractured and delicate.
The purple lines are the same bars, the yellow one shows the straightness, the orange circle shows the part sticking past that isn’t visible in the photo on the left because of the perspective, the red shows a similar angle, and the green shows the narrow waist.
The big block on chains is likely He-Hum-1, aka BYU 16776, a Diplodocus (?) humerus nearly 80 cm long. I suspect the jacket had “He-Misc-,” likely BYU 20173, a sternal plate as well as “cdl-1,” which should be BYU 12996, a diplodocid mid-caudal. Perhaps a few other bits were in the block; that area was a bone salad.
Neat pics! Hope that helps!!!
I’m happy to bow to Brian’s expertise on this: he knows those bones much better than I do, maybe better than anyone does.
Why anyone would left-right reverse a photo for a book, I can’t imagine, but it does seem that’s what happened.
Colour photos of the “Ultrasaurus” quarry
October 24, 2025
Long-time SV-POW! reader Tyler Holmes came across a book with the very un-searchable title “Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs” — I tried to find it in the Internet Archive, but there are waaay too many books of that name. He emailed me about it because it contains three colour photos of the excavation of our old friend “Ultrasaurus“.
Here they are, with their captions as they appear in the book.
First, a very familiar image — a similar but not identical one is reproduced in Jensen (1985:figure 4A) and Jensen (1987:fig 6A) — but here it appears for the first time in colour.
Jim Jensen lays alongside the nine-foot-long scapula (shoulder blade) of Ultrasaurus.
(No: Jim Jensen lies alongside the scapula. Also, it’s not just a scapula, it’s a scapulocoracoid, i.e. the coracoid is fused to the scapula. Also, it’s not nine feet long, it’s 2500 mm (Curtice et al. 1995:88), which is eight feet 2.5 inches. Otherwise, this caption is fine.)
Next, a photo that is completely new to me:
Half of a scapula (shoulder blade) of Ultrasaurus is lifted by a crane.
Is this the scapula? Maaaybe, but the shape of the jacket, and the cross-section of bone shown in the end of the jacket closest to us, doesn’t seem right. This looks more like part of a long bone — femur or humerus, or maybe radius/ulna or tibia/fibula. But I’m not aware of any femur or humerus having come out of the Dry Mesa quarry, so who knows?
Finally, this:
The scapula of Ultrasaurus being excavated.
This can’t be right. In the photo above, which definitely is the “Ultrasauros” scap, the glenoid is facing clockwise if you think of the whole bone as being able to rotate about its midpoint; but in this photo it must be facing anticlockwise at top left. So I conclude it’s one of the Supersaurus scaps — either the left in lateral view or the right in medial.
I wonder where the originals of these photos are, and whether there are more? I suppose I ought to ask the people at BYU.
References
- Curtice, Brian D., Kenneth L. Stadtman and Linda J. Curtice. 1996. A reassessment of Ultrasauros macintoshi (Jensen, 1985). The continental Jurassic M. Morales (Ed.) Museum of Northern Arizona Bulleti. 60:87-95.
- Jensen, James A. 1985. Three new sauropod dinosaurs from the Upper Jurassic of Colorado. Great Basin Naturalist 45(4):697-709.
- Jensen, James A. 1987. New brachiosaur material from the Late Jurassic of Utah and Colorado. Great Basin Naturalist 47(4):592-608.
Sauropod dinosaur body plan for DinoCon 2025
August 17, 2025
This thing arrived in the mail yesterday. Just in time…
I say “semi-spoileriffic” because I’m not going to go out of my way to give away any plot points or creature details you couldn’t get from watching the trailers and TV spots, but if you want to keep yourself pure as the driven snow, you might want to save this post for later.
I don’t know that I’ve ever done a movie review on this blog. It’s not really our thing here. Plus, no previous Jurassic World movie has interested me very much. I mean, of course I saw them all, because dinosaurs. In the introduction to his story collection “Dinosaur Tales”, Ray Bradbury describes going with his friend Ray Harryhausen and their spouses to see a production of the opera Siegfried, for no better reason than to catch a glimpse of the dragon Fafnir. I can relate.
Jurassic World Rebirth has interested me, in part because Aquilops is in it, but also because I’ve been holding out hope that it might be decent. Stephen King once wrote in an essay that he knew that almost all horror movies were going to be poorly-written, clumsily-executed cliche-fests, but he kept going because one in a hundred bottled the lightning and made him genuinely feel something. That was approximately my hope here. David Koepp coming back to write the screenplay was a big point in the movie’s favor, as was Gareth Edwards in the director’s chair. Hence my cautious optimism.
So how’d it work out?
I did not in a million years think that I’d have my choice of two interactive Aquilops toys to take with me when I went to see Aquilops on the big screen.
I liked it! It’s not perfect, but I think it does a lot of things better than any other Jurassic World movie, and in my opinion it’s easily the best Jurassic Park/World movie since the original. I’ll do my best to tease out the bits that I think are objectively good from the bits where the movie was pushing my specific buttons.
Things I think are objectively good about the movie:
Sense of wonder — there are some scenes that read as very explicit homages to thematically similar scenes in the original Jurassic Park, that emphasize the sheer amazingness of dinosaurs as living animals, and as metaphors for the grandeur of nature. Of course, every Jurassic franchise film has Dinosaurs Getting Out And That Being a Problem, but the last three movies made the dinosaurs a little too contained, a little too controlled, a little too commodified. Which leads me to:
Basic scenario — I’m on the fence about whether this point is an objective or a subjective one. Personally, if I’m going to see what is basically a monster movie about big wild animals, a small team on the ground in the unknown surrounded by monsters is much more interesting and compelling than putting the monsters in a human environment. It’s why Kong: Skull Island is my favorite Monsterverse movie (Godzilla: King of the Monsters is second, mostly because it gives us so many interesting environments that aren’t cities). But I think the scenario of putting people into a wild environment just makes more sense for dinosaurs. None of these movies exist in a vacuum, and if we’re going to put monsters in a human environment, we might as well go the whole distance and have Godzilla or Pacific Rim. As soon as the humans were stranded on the island, outnumbered, outgunned, clearly the underdogs, I was like, “Hell yeah, let’s roll.”
Moral compass — I’m not going to lean on this one too heavily, because it’s not a huge part of the movie, but Jurassic World Rebirth is About Something in a way that most of the other movies after the original have not been. I mean, they’re all sorta about Greed is Bad and Kills People, but mostly not in a very interesting or inspiring way. There are at least a couple of moments in this movie where OA advocates might do a fist-pump, and Elsevier execs might squirm in their seats, and I’ll take it. It was also nice to see science presented as an altruistic endeavor. Obviously scientists are human and science is a human endeavor, with all the imperfections that implies, but the motivation to learn and to share is the beating heart of science, and it’s nice to see some love for the better angels.
Characters — Others may disagree, and that’s fine, but I thought for a movie that had to cover a lot of ground, literally and metaphorically, and put the dinosaurs front and center, Jurassic World Rebirth did a decent job of sketching its main characters and giving them each a motivation and a chance to learn or grow at least a little. I got more out of it than any of the previous sequels, anyway.
The Aquilops shoulder pal won out, because it let me go hands-free, and it has an off switch.
Some things I wasn’t so wild about:
Unconvincing rationale — Look, I get it, there’s going to be some hand-wavy not-quite-science because it’s a sci-fi movie and not a documentary. And to be fair, the movie at least takes a stab at justifying the collection of living tissue. But if the company that inherited the InGen IP had all the critters’ genomes and the ability to translate them into embryos, it’s not obvious why they couldn’t just culture some titanosaur heart muscle in vitro and call it a day. Maybe this is just a Tolkien’s eagles thing, but it feels like something that Jim Cameron would have sewn up a little tighter (say what you will about his movies, but their information hygiene is usually hermetic).
Mutant dinosaurs — Oh boy, do I have Thoughts about this. Starting with Indominus rex in Jurassic World, these movies have pushed the line that the public would get bored of regular dinosaurs, so InGen (or whoever) had to keep making up new dinosaurs. But there’s an elision here between the fiction and the metafiction. There is 100% a company that keeps making up new dinosaurs because their execs think regular dinosaurs are too vanilla to keep the public’s interest, but it isn’t InGen, it’s Universal. That really irritates me, because it says to me that the folks in charge don’t believe in the mission. So what if they just…didn’t? I think the previous Jurassic World movies would have done just fine without mutant dinosaurs, and I think that in part because their mutant dinosaurs were so boring. Indominus rex is morphologically just a big allosauroid, to the extent that some people were using their I. rex figures as Saurophaganax stand-ins in their head canon (I discovered while working on the Allosaurus anax project). Indoraptor is just a slightly bigger, slightly smarter, still feather-less dromaeosaur. Big whoop. I’ll say this for Jurassic World Rebirth: the mutadons and D. rex are at least actually weird enough to be believable as mutants. Even if plot-wise you could swap them for ‘vanilla’ raptors and tyrannosaurs and everything would still work.
Bad nomenclature — Okay, this is an inside-baseball thing to grump about, but hey, the name of the blog is a clue to the background geekiness level around here. Titanosaurus hasn’t been a valid genus for a minute. Why not call the super-gigantic titanosaurs in the movie Argentinosaurus or Patagotitan or Sauroposeidon (he suggested modestly)? Also, we don’t have to guess what the head of Quetzalcoatlus looked like, we know pretty much the whole thing from Q. langstoni Q. lawsoni. If the moviemakers wanted to have their big pterosaur look like not-Quetz, that’s cool, but then why call it Quetz? Call it Hatzegopteryx or Arambourgiana or one of the other big azhdarchids for which complete skulls are not yet known, they’re all equally unpronounceable to civilians. Or just make it look like actual Quetz, it will still be sufficiently terrifying with the crest in the right place.
Reasonably predictable — You’ll figure out right away who’s going to live, who’s going to die, who’s going to have a heel turn, and who will be redeemed, based solely on the prominence and likeability of the actors playing them. Part of me would have loved to see the movie go a little harder — it’s directed by Gareth “I nuked the Rogue One cast from orbit” Edwards, after all. But even my shriveled little heart smiled at the happy ending, so there’s that.
On the upside, they look like giant titanosaurs, not just generic long-necks.
And finally, so I can end on a positive note, here are some things that really worked for me, but which might not work for everyone.
The movie had a lot of bits that were unexpectedly resonant for me. I’ve seen a blue whale up close on a whale-watching trip, and it was one of those moments, like my first time peering down into the Grand Canyon, where my brain just couldn’t fully process what I was seeing. I saw the blue whale, but I had a hard time believing it, even after living for decades with the intellectual knowledge of how big they are, and even after seeing grays and humpbacks on previous trips. One shot in the mosasaur chase brought that blue whale encounter roaring back into my mind. Another example: there’s a point fairly early on when the team has its first real success, and for a minute or two everyone is happy is that they’ve pulled off something logistically challenging. I thought, “Yeah, that’s exactly what it feels like when we get a big jacket out of the field in one piece”. Everyone’s happy, everyone’s relieved, fingers and toes (and hooves) are all accounted for, and the specimen we came for is safe.
Like this.
The paleontologist in the movie, Dr. Henry Loomis, played by Jonathan Bailey, is a very believable combination of basically competent, starry-eyed, and thoroughly geeky. At one point Mahershala Ali’s character laughs out loud and says, “You’re so weird!” in response to something Loomis just said. That made me laugh out loud, because what Loomis said is something that I have heard my paleontologist friends say more than once. I think most paleontologists would like to see themselves as Alan Grant or Ellie Sattler, but in truth most of us have a stripe of Ross Geller a mile wide. Bailey hits that balance with uncanny precision. Of all of the depictions of paleontologists in pop culture, Henry Loomis is the one that made me nod and smile in recognition the most. Not just, “I’d go to the field with that guy”, but “I’ve been to the field with that guy”.
Speaking of, I also laughed out loud at several other points in the movie, which is for me a big deal. A movie like this doesn’t need to be a wall-to-wall quip-fest, and this one is not, but a few well-earned chuckles make the whole thing a lot more enjoyable.
Squeee!!
Finally, even after watching a million trailers and promo videos, I got misty-eyed when Dolores the Aquilops first appeared. That was surprisingly moving for me, to see ‘my’ little dinosaur up there on the big screen. I shed a happy tear at one other point in the movie, which will be completely obvious to anyone who’s seen it, so I won’t belabor it here. It’s a big moment for one of the characters, and it made me think, “Yeah, that’s my dream, too.”
Given that, you’d better take this whole post with an evaporated ocean of salt, because my objectivity has been compromised.
So anyway, I liked it, a lot, and I’m gonna see it again. You?
If you believe in “Artificial Intelligence”, take five minutes to ask it about stuff you know well
February 14, 2025
Here’s a Mastodon thread from a year ago.
Just a quick check on how ChatGPT’s getting on …
Me: Who reassigned the species Brachiosaurus brancai to its own genus, and when?
ChatGPT: The species Brachiosaurus brancai was reassigned to its own genus, Giraffatitan, by the paleontologist Michael Janensch in 1914.
Me: Dude, that is so wrong I can’t even.
ChatGPT: I apologize for the mistake in my previous response. The reassignment of Brachiosaurus brancai to Giraffatitan brancai was not done by Michael Janensch. The correct attribution goes to the paleontologist Ernst Stromer, who reclassified it in 1914.
Me: That answer is even worse. Stromer had nothing to do with the genus name or species name.
ChatGPT: I apologize for the confusion in my previous responses. The reassignment of Brachiosaurus brancai to Giraffatitan brancai was actually done by the paleontologist Werner Janensch, not Michael Janensch, in 1914.
sigh
Regular readers will know that the actual sequence of events was:
- Riggs (1903) named the genus Brachiosaurus and its type species Brachiosaurus altithorax.
- Janensch (1914) named a second species of this genus, “Brachiosaurus” brancai.
- Paul (1988) considered the two species separate at the subgeneric level (a taxonomic level that is rarely if ever used in vertebrate palaeontology) and named the subgenus Brachiosaurus (Giraffatitan) brancai.
- Olshevsky (1991) used the genus-and-species combination Giraffatitan brancai without comment in a self-published booklet, a combinaton which was not followed by any formal publication known to me, until …
- Taylor (2009) demonstrated that numerous characters separate the two species and that Giraffatitan is a separate genus with type species G. brancai.
Now, ChatGPT got every single part of that wrong. It left Riggs, Paul, Olshevsky and me out completely. It credited Werner Janensch for reassigning a species to a genus whose name was coined 19 years after he died. It pulled poor Ernst Stromer in for some reason. It invented “the paleontologist Michael Janensch”, who is presumably the unholy offspring of Werner Janensch and me. And in all three answers, it insisted that the reassignment was done in 1914, 74 years before the name Giraffatitan was coined.
But the worst part of this is not the errors. It’s not the blithe confidence with which the false facts are recited. It’s not even the bland “I apologize for the mistake in my previous response” to be followed by more utter nonsense. It’s that these incorrect answers look so plausible. For a lay-person — someone who, foolishly, has not been reading this blog for the last eighteen years — the answers given here look superficially reasonable. A kid doing a homework report on Brachiosaurus could take these answers and weave them into the submission without even having an inkling that they’re completely wrong. And the teacher who has to mark the essay will also likely swallow them.
Because LLMs get catastrophically wrong answers on topics I know well, I do not trust them at all on topics I don’t already know. And if you do trust them, I urge you to spend five minutes asking your favourite one about something you know in detail.
Why do I keep banging on about this? Because we’ve reached an especially toxic phase in the history of AI. A lot of companies have ploughed billions of dollars into the dream of being able to replace human workers with machines, and they are desperate to make us believe it’s going to work — if only so they can cash out their investments while the stocks are still high. We’re in the “pump” phase of an industry-wide pump-and-dump. It would be wise for all to beware getting suckered in.
(Disclaimer: LLMs are useful for some classes of queries. I use them a lot to remind me of programming-language idioms, asking questions like “In Go, if I have an object satisfying the error interface, how can I determine which specific kind of error structure it is?”. They’re good for this because you can quickly determine whether the answer is correct or not, thanks to the merciless compiler. LLMs are not useless; they’re just way overhyped and misapplied.)
References
- Janensch, Werner. 1914. Ubersicht uber der Wirbeltierfauna der Tendaguru-Schichten nebst einer kurzen Charakterisierung der neu aufgefuhrten Arten von Sauropoden. Archiv fur Biontologie, Berlin, III, 1(1):81-110.
- Olshevsky, George. 1991. A Revision of the Parainfraclass Archosauria Cope, 1869, Excluding the Advanced Crocodylia. Mesozoic Meanderings #2 (1st printing): iv + 196 pp.
- Paul, Gregory S. 1988. The brachiosaur giants of the Morrison and Tendaguru with a description of a new subgenus, Giraffatitan, and a comparison of the world’s largest dinosaurs. Hunteria 2(3):1-14.
- Riggs, Elmer S. 1903. Brachiosaurus altithorax, the largest known dinosaur. American Journal of Science 15(4):299-306.
- Taylor, Michael P. 2009. A re-evaluation of Brachiosaurus altithorax Riggs 1903 (Dinosauria, Sauropoda) and its generic separation from Giraffatitan brancai (Janensch 1914). Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 29(3):787-806.
Behold! The glory of the Lego Giraffatitan
November 17, 2024
For our wedding anniversary last year (30 years!), Fiona gave me the very wonderful Lego 21320 kit, Dinosaur Fossils, which builds into impressive skeletons of Tyrannosaurus, Triceratops and Pteranodon. This is a truly great kit and I’d encourage anyone to go out and find one.
But you know what’s even better that Lego Tyrannosaurus, Triceratops and Pteranodon? Lego Giraffatitan.
This is not a kit you can buy, but a rebuild of 21320, using free instructions provided by someone going by the name LegoFossil. I don’t know who that person is, but I salute him or her!
Part of what’s beautiful about this is that it’s not just any old Giraffatitan, it’s very recognizably the specific mounted skeleton in Berlin, with the same pose and the extra skull down at ground level where you can actually see it. But more than that: in a way I can hardly explain, it captures the spirit of that mount.
It looks great from lots of different directions. Check it out:
It’s not perfect — what is? The forelimbs are distinctly thicker in lateral view than the hindlimbs, where they should be pretty much the same. The scapulocoracoids are beautiful and big, but leave the ilia looking a bit anaemic by comparison. Limitations of the available connectors mean that the stride is somewhat exaggerated. But all these things are easy to forgive because it just looks so darned good.
That’s why it’s been sitting in the centre of our mantelpiece for the last seven months:
All hail the Lego Giraffatitan!
If I could dissect a sauropod…
September 12, 2024
Luke Horton asked in a comment on a recent post:
Given the chance to examine a titanosaur cadaver with your hypothetical army of anatomists, what would you look for first?
*FACEPALM* How we’ve gone almost 17 years without posting about a hypothetical sauropod dissection is quite beyond my capacity. I am also contractually obligated to remind you that the TV show “Inside Nature’s Giants” shows dissections of a whale, elephant, giraffe, tiger, anaconda, giant squid, etc., so it’s probably the closest we’ll ever get. Go look up photos of Dr. Joy Reidenberg standing, um, amidst a partially-dissected whale, or just watch that episode, and your sauropod-dissection-visualizer will be properly calibrated.
To get back to Luke’s question, there are loads of interesting things that could be dissected in a sauropod, but since the remit here is Matt Wedel x titanosaur, there’s only one possible answer: the lung/air sac system and its diverticula. For several reasons:
Hypothetical reconstruction of the lungs (red) and air sacs (blue, green, and gray) in Haplocanthosaurus CM 879. I’d love to know how close this is to reality. Wedel (2009: fig. 10).
First and most obviously, I’ve spent the last quarter-century trying to infer as much as possible about the respiratory systems of sauropods based on the patterns of pneumaticity in their skeletons, and I’d kill for the opportunity to check the accuracy of my inferences — and those of all my fellow-travelers in the sauropod and dinosaur respiration biz, like Daniela Schwarz and Emma Schachner and Tito Aureliano and many others.
Sauropod respiratory system modeled on that of a bird. I’ll bet the correspondence wasn’t this close. (Also, since making this figure 20 years ago, I’ve learned that the abdominal air sacs of ostriches are actually rather small, although the perirenal, femoral, and subcutaneous diverticula of the abdominal air sacs are extensive; see Bezuidenhout et al. 1999). Wedel and Cifelli (2005: fig. 14).
Second, I am intrigued/haunted by the possibility that extant birds might not represent the apex of saurischian lung/air sac evolution. Birds survived the K-Pg disaster because they were small; respiratory efficiency had little or nothing to do with it (evidence: all the other small-bodied tetrapods that survived, like the many, many squamate and mammalian lineages). To me it would be a wild coincidence if the tiny dinosaurs that survived also just happened to be The Bestest (TM) at some anatomical/physiological thing unrelated to their survival. In fact, given how sensitive birds are to airborne dust and ash, I wonder if their fancy lungs weren’t more of a hindrance than a help in the dusty, sooty, iridium-laced post-impact world. Anyway, there are interesting clues that the air sac systems of extant birds are just one subset of a much greater original diversity, like most (all?) birds starting out embryologically with a dozen or so air sacs, which get simplified to the usual 9 or fewer by fusions. What did other dinosaurs do with their 12 (or more?) air sacs? If any dinosaurian clade was going to push the capabilities of the “avian” lung/air sac system in interesting directions and to fascinating extremes, sauropods seem like a good bet.
Rib articulation angles in the dorsal vertebrae of (a) Lufengosaurus, (b) Diplodocus, (c) Haplocanthosaurus, (d) Tyrannosaurus, and (e) an ostrich. Anterior is to the right. Diplodocus and Haplocanthosaurus are pretty wildly different considering they coexisted in the Morrison. I really gotta write a whole post about that. Boisvert et al. (2024: fig. 12).
So I’m intrigued by the idea that extant birds show us one way that a saurischian lung/air sac system can work, but don’t exhaust the territory, anymore than kangaroos show us all the ways that mammals can reproduce. Maybe sauropods had even better lungs than birds! Or maybe not. Likely they were doing their own weirdly specialized thing — or many weirdly specialized things — that left few to no diagnostic traces in their skeletons. We can be pretty confident that at least some of the pneumatic diverticula of sauropods worked essentially identically to how they do in birds (see Woodruff et al. 2022 and this post), and mid-dorsal pneumatic hiatuses in juvenile sauropods — predicted by me in 2003, found by Melstrom et al. (2016) and Hanik et al. (2017) — suggest that their air sac systems were broadly comparable. On the other hand, the variety of rib articulation angles just within Morrison sauropods tells us they weren’t all ventilating their air sacs in quite the same way (Boisvert et al. 2024), despite broad similarities with other dinos at the levels of rib osteology (Wang et al. 2023) and whole-thorax construction (Schachner et al. 2009, 2011). (Aside: why the hell didn’t I work a citation of Wang et al. 2023 into the Dry Mesa Haplo paper? I can only conclude that I am at least occasionally an idiot.) Whatever was going on, I’m pretty sure sauropods didn’t look exactly like 60-ton turkeys on the inside, but we don’t have a ton of real data on how they differed. It would be amazing to find out.
The mounted Rapetosaurus skeleton at the Field Museum, traced from a photo. Specific weird things to note: neck about twice as long as tail, cervical vertebrae about twice as tall as dorsals, and smallish pelvic bones relative to hindlimbs (= skinny posterior abdomen, at least dorsoventrally). See this post for details.
Third, if any sauropods were going to rival or exceed birds in fancy under-the-hood anatomical and physiological adaptations, my money would be on titanosaurs. They were morphologically disparate, phylogenetically diverse, geographically widespread, they independently evolved to giant size more times than any other sauropod clade, and their growth rates were wild. I’d dissect any sauropod I got access to (uh duh), but a titanosaur would be particularly appealing. Which titanosaur? Probably Rapetosaurus: we know it grew very fast early on (Curry Rogers et al. 2016, and see implications for the nervous system in Smith et al. 2022), it had a highly pneumatic vertebral column (O’Connor 2006), its body proportions were pretty wacky, and it had other features of interest to me, like expanded neurocentral joints (see Wedel and Atterholt 2023 and this post) and neural canal ridges (see Atterholt et al. 2024 and this post).
I used this photo of a Rapetosaurus caudal vertebra a few posts ago to illustrate the neural canal ridges, but — like many other sauropods — it also has very expanded neurocentral joints forming boutons. From Curry Rogers (2009: fig. 27).
Oh, and if I got to dissect more than one sauropod, the rest of my top 5 choices in order would be:
- the owner of BYU 9024 (Supersaurus? Giant ancient individual of Barosaurus? Are those even different things? Dissecting this critter could tell us!), Barosaurus being the most diplodocid-y and least titanosaur-y neosauropod I know of, and BYU 9024 being from a hellaciously big individual no matter what its classification;
- the Snowmass Haplocanthosaurus, because I have just so many questions about all the weird stuff going on with its tail (see Wedel et al. 2021 and this post for starters);
- Omeisaurus or Xinjiangtitan, to represent a maximally derived-but-also-weird non-neosauropod;
- Sauroposeidon, for obvious emotional reasons (but not enough to dethrone the others).
After that? Probably Isanosaurus or Melanorosaurus or something else waaaay down the tree, so I could see how much of the sauropod kit was in place from the get-go (probably most of it).
Bone vs joint space in the proximal caudals of the Snowmass Haplocanthosaurus. I’d give one non-essential organ to dissect that tail!
And after the respiratory system, next up for me would be the spinal cord and any related morphological specializations of the neural canal — see Table 3 in Atterholt et al. (2024) for a running tally, and this page. Then intervertebral joints, digestive tract, and reproductive system (neither of the last two leave anything useful in the way of skeletal traces), in that order. Arguably the intervertebral joints would be a bigger score for sauropod paleobiology than spinal cord stuff, but maybe not, and having squelched my emotional pick among sauropod taxa, I’m letting my emotions rule when choosing body systems to dissect. I also am intensely interested in the possibility of protofeathers in sauropods, but you don’t have to dissect those, you can just see if any are present, so I’d cheat a little and note any integumentary specializations en passant. (Remember than an animal can have hairs without being hairy [naked mole rats, rhinos, manatees, dolphins], ditto for feathers.)
So that’s the sauropod and the body system I’d dissect first, if given the chance. What’s your answer?
References
- Atterholt, J., Wedel, M.J., Tykoski, R., Fiorillo, A.R., Holwerda, F., Nalley, T.K., Lepore, T., and Yasmer, J. 2024. Neural canal ridges: a novel osteological correlate of postcranial neuroanatomy in dinosaurs. The Anatomical Record, 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1002/ar.25558
- Bezuidenhout, A.J., H.B. Groenewald, and J.T. Soley. 1999. An anatomical study of the respiratory air sacs in ostriches. Onderstepoort Journal of Veterinary Research 66:317-325.
- Boisvert, Colin, Curtice, Brian, Wedel, Mathew, & Wilhite, Ray. 2024. Description of a new specimen of Haplocanthosaurus from the Dry Mesa Dinosaur Quarry. The Anatomical Record, 1–19. http://doi.org/10.1002/ar.25520
- Curry Rogers, Kristina. 2009. The postcranial osteology of Rapetosaurus krausei (Sauropoda: Titanosauria) from the Late Cretaceous of Madagascar. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 29:1046-1086.
- Curry Rogers, K., M. Whitney, M. D. D’Emic, and B. Bagley. 2016. Precocity in a tiny titanosaur from the Late Cretaceous of Madagascar. Science 352:450–454.
- Hanik, Gina M., Matthew C. Lamanna and John A. Whitlock. 2017. A juvenile specimen of Barosaurus Marsh, 1890 (Sauropoda: Diplodocidae) from the Upper Jurassic Morrison Formation of Dinosaur National Monument, Utah, USA. Annals of Carnegie Museum 84(3):253–263.
- Melstrom, Keegan M., Michael D. D’Emic, Daniel Chure and Jeffrey A. Wilson. 2016. A juvenile sauropod dinosaur from the Late Jurassic of Utah, USA, presents further evidence of an avian style air-sac system. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 36(4):e1111898. doi:10.1080/02724634.2016.1111898
- O’Connor, P.M. 2006. Postcranial pneumaticity: an evaluation of soft-tissue influences on the postcranial skeleton and the reconstruction of pulmonary anatomy in archosaurs. Journal of Morphology 267: 1199-1226.
- Schachner, E.R., Lyson, T.R. and Dodson, P., 2009. Evolution of the respiratory system in nonavian theropods: evidence from rib and vertebral morphology. The Anatomical Record 292(9): 1501-1513.
- Schachner, E.R., Farmer, C.G., McDonald, A.T. and Dodson, P., 2011. Evolution of the dinosauriform respiratory apparatus: new evidence from the postcranial axial skeleton. The Anatomical Record 294(9): 1532-1547.
- Smith, Douglas H., Rodgers, Jeffrey M., Dollé, Jean-Pierre, and Wedel, Mathew J. 2022. Giraffes vs. blue whales vs. dinosaurs: contest reveals which one builds its nervous system fastest to evade predators. Scientific American, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/giraffes-vs-blue-whales-vs-dinosaurs-contest-reveals-which-one-builds-its-nervous-system-fastest-to-evade-predators/
- Wang, Y.Y., Claessens, L.P. and Sullivan, C., 2023. Deep reptilian evolutionary roots of a major avian respiratory adaptation. Communications Biology, 6(1), p.3.
- Wedel, M.J. 2003a. Vertebral pneumaticity, air sacs, and the physiology of sauropod dinosaurs. Paleobiology 29:243-255.
- Wedel, M.J. 2009. Evidence for bird-like air sacs in saurischian dinosaurs. Journal of Experimental Zoology 311A:611-628.
- Wedel, M.J., and Atterholt, J. 2023. Expanded neurocentral joints in the vertebrae of sauropod dinosaurs. In Hunt-Foster, R.K., Kirkland, J.I., and Loewen, M.A. (eds), 14th Symposium on Mesozoic Terrestrial Ecosystems and Biota. The Anatomical Record 306(S1):256-257.
- Wedel, M.J., and Cifelli, R.L. 2005. Sauroposeidon: Oklahoma’s native giant. Oklahoma Geology Notes 65 (2):40-57.
- Wedel, Mathew; Atterholt, Jessie; Dooley, Jr., Alton C.; Farooq, Saad; Macalino, Jeff; Nalley, Thierra K.; Wisser, Gary; and Yasmer, John. 2021. Expanded neural canals in the caudal vertebrae of a specimen of Haplocanthosaurus. Academia Letters, Article 911, 10pp.
- Woodruff, D. Cary, Wolff, Ewan D.S., Wedel, Mathew J., Dennison, Sophie, and Witmer, Lawrence M. 2022. The first occurrence of an avian-style respiratory infection in a non-avian dinosaur. Scientific Reports 12, 1954. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-05761-3
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 