The history of Supersaurus — and its buddies Ultrasauros and Dystylosaurus — is pretty complicated, and there seems to be no one source for it. But having read a lot about these animals in the process of writing eleven mostly pretty substantial posts about them, I feel like I’m starting to put it all together.

Back in 2005, three years before their paper on the WDC Supersaurus known as Jimbo was published, Lovelace at al. presented their work as a poster at the annual SVP meeting.

I keep wishing there was a single place out there where I could look up Jensen’s old BYU specimen numbers for Supersaurus , Ultrasaurus and Dystylosaurus elements, and find the modern equivalents, or vice versa. Then I realised there’s no reason not to just make one. So here goes! The first column shows the specimen numbers as used in Jensen (1985), and last column contains Jensen’s own assignments except where noted.

As noted in the last post, Matt and I are off to spend a week at the Carnegie Museum from 11th-15th March. We expect to see many, many fascinating specimens there: far more than we’ll be able to do proper work on in the five days we have. So our main goal is to exhaustively document the most important specimens that we see, so we can work on them later after we’ve got home.

Things remain frantic on the Sauropocalypse tour. Today, we were back at the BYU Museum of Paleontology, working on four or five separate projects.

At the top: our old friend BYU 9024 — the cervical vertebra that’s part of the Supersaurus vivianae holotype. At the bottom, C2 (the longest cervical) of Giraffa camelopardalis angolensis FMNH 34426. The Supersaurus vertebra is 138 cm long. We don’t know which cervical it is, but there’s no reason to think it’s the longest. The giraffe vertebra is 31 cm long.

If you found the hypothetical Amphicoelias fragillimus cervical in a recent post a bit too much to swallow, I won’t blame you. But how big do we know Morrison diplodocoid cervicals got? The longest centrum of any specimen of anything, anywhere, is that of the cervical vertebra BYU 9024 that’s part of the Supersaurus vivianae holotype.

I recently stumbled across this rather good photograph of the holotype vertebra of our old buddy “ Ultrasauros “, thanks to Wikipedia contributor Ninjatacoshell, and thought you’d like to see it: This is a rather legendary vertebra, but until recently there were no good photographs of it on the web (I know because I tried to find one for my talk at the Dinosaurs: A Historical Perspective conference in 2008). See It’s

At 9:43 this morning, Darren’s wife Toni gave birth to their daughter Emma. I don’t know much more than that except that everyone is well. Join me in offering Darren, Toni and Emma your congratulations!

Unbelievably, despite the fact that it is one of my favorite places in the world, despite the fact that it is just 10 fast hours away by car, across some of the most desolate and beautiful country on the planet, I have not been to BYU since the fall of 2005. The highlight of my last trip was spending a little quality time with the Dry Mesa Supersaurus cervical. You’ve seen it here before so you know it’s dimensions…sorta.