On Monday we visited the Prehistoric Museum in Price, Utah, the Cleveland-Lloyed dinosaur quarry, and sites in the Mussentuchit member of the Cedar Mountain Formation. Many thanks to Marc Jones for the photos. In 2010, the College of Eastern Utah became Utah State University – Eastern, and the CEU Prehistoric Museum in Price is now officially the USU Eastern Prehistoric Museum. The dinosaurs in the center of exhibit hall are being remounted.

In a comment on the previous post, Steve P. asked whether “ Apatosaurus ” minimus might not be a Apatosaurus specimen after all — particularly, an Apatosaurus ajax individual resembling NSMT-PV 20375, the one in the National Science Museum, Tokyo, that Upchurch et al. (2005) so lavishly monographed.

I mentioned a few posts ago that Matt and I are working on a redescription of AMNH 675, a sauropod specimen referred by Mook (1917) to “ Apatosaurus ” minimus , but which everyone knows is not Apatosaurus . We plan to share the illustrations from this in-progress paper as we prepare them, so here is perhaps the key one: Sacrum and fused ilia of AMNH 675, “Apatosaurus” minimus. Top row: left lateral and right lateral;

It’s been a little quiet around here lately. Mike has been slammed with day-job work, Darren is terminally busy as always, and I’m in my fall teaching block so I’ve been too busy to think. But life rolls on and there are announcements that need making. To wit: – My post on the long nerves of sauropods was chosen as one of ten blog posts for the Science Writer Tip Jar at Not Exactly Rocket Science, back in May.

Let’s look a bit more closely at the holotype element of Brontomerus mcintoshi , which as we all remember is the juvenile left ilium OMNH 66430.  Much of what we’ve said about Brontomerus is based on the shape of that ilium, so it’s important to get right.

Introduction Many people in the paleontological community have probably seen the comments about our work on Brontomerus by Jim Kirkland. Most of these comments have been posted on Facebook or sent around by email. We have held off until now in responding to them because we wanted to have everything–both the criticisms and our responses–publicly available to everyone, not in the walled garden of Facebook.

Today is the culmination of a project that I and Matt, and our co-author Rich Cifelli, are very proud of: the publication of the new sauropod, Brontomerus mcintoshi . Go and read the paper — it’s open access, thanks to the good folks at Acta Palaeontologica Polonica . Speculative life restoration of the camarasauromorph sauropod Brontomerus mcintoshi from the Lower Cretaceous Cedar Mountain Formation of Utah.