On the excellent and convivial social network Mastodon, someone going by the handle “gay ornithopod” asked what turned out to be a fascinating question: My first response was that we can only say it’s not unusual for extant animals to change colour through ontogeny, so the null hypothesis would have to be that at least some sauropods (and other dinosaurs) did the same. But I don’t think we have any information on the specific coloration.

In a comment on the last post, on the mass of Dreadnoughtus , Asier Larramendi wrote: So I did. The table of measurements in the supplementary material is admirably complete. For all of the available dorsal vertebrae except D9, which I suppose must have been too poorly preserved to measure the difference, Lacovara et al. list both the total centrum length and the centrum length minus the anterior condyle.

In the paper describing the new giant titanosaur Dreadnoughtus , Lacovara et al. (2014) use the limb bone allometry equation of Campione and Evans (2012) to derive a mass estimate for the holotype individual of 59.3 metric tons. This is presumably the “middle of the road” value spat out by the equation; the 95% confidence interval on either side probably goes from 40 to 80 metric tons or maybe even wider.

Mike and I are in York for SVPCA — more on that soonish — and I just wanted to get out some quick thoughts about the world’s newest giant sauropod. First off, the paper (Lacovara et al. 2014) is open access, which is great.