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I got an email a couple of days ago from Maija Karala, asking me a question I’d not come across before (among several other questions): how much poop did Argentinosaurus produce in a day? I don’t recall this question having been addressed in the literature, though if anyone knows different please shout. Having thought about it a little, I sent the following really really vague and hand-wavy response.
A bunch of stuff, loosely organized by theme. Media First up, I need to thank Brian Switek, who invited me to comment on Patagotitan for his piece at Smithsonian. I think he did a great job on that, arguably the best of any of the first-day major media outlet pieces.
“But wait, Matt”, I hear you thinking. “Every news agency in the world is tripping over themselves declaring Patagotitan the biggest dinosaur of all time. Why are you going in the other direction?” Because I’ve been through this a few times now.
Last night London and I spent the night in the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (LACM), as part of the Camp Dino overnight adventure. So we got lots of time to roam the exhibit halls when they were–very atypically–almost empty.
[This is a guest post by frequent commenter Heinrich Mallison . Heinrich is maybe best known to SV-POW! readers for his work on digital modelling of sauropodomorphs, though that may change now that his paper on sauropod rearing mechanics is out. Read on …] — Maybe this post should have been titled “How sauropods breathed, ate, and farted”. Or maybe not.
As often happens here, a comment thread got to be more interesting than the original post and ended up deserving a post of its own. In this case, I’m talking about the thread following the recent Mamenchisaurus tail club post, which got into some interesting territory regarding mass estimates for the largest sauropods.
So I finally got to see the Discovery Channel’s new series, Clash of the Dinosaurs . The show follows the common Discovery Channel MO of cutting between CGI critters and talking heads. I’m one of the talking heads, and I get a lot of air time, and I suppose I should be happy about that. But I’m not, for reasons I’ll explain. I need to preface what follows by saying that I thought the other talking heads did a great job.
A quick follow-up on Darren’s recent post: the reconstructed Argentinosaurus dorsal in the photo he used seems to be based on the anterior dorsal of the holotype — at the least, the proportions and most of the features are the same — so we can get some more information by looking at the figure of the same element in the description of Bonaparte and Coria (1993). Here it is: This shows the details better than the photo, though admittedly it’s
Newsflash: some sauropods were really, really big. But perhaps it’s not always obvious just how big some of them were… maybe this photo should help.