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Back into 2019, when Matt and I visited the Carnegie Museum, we were struck by how different the necks of juvenile and adult Tyrannosaurus rex individuals are. In particular, the juvenile individual known as Jane has a slender and amost fragile-looking neck compared with the monstrously robust neck of its adult counterpart.

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Most dinosaurs are elegant animals. Tyrannosaurs are elegant biting machines. Chasmosaurs are elegent. Brachiosaurs are hella elegant. Even ankylosaurs have their own robust elegance.

While I was thinking about Diplodocus atlas ribs, I was reminded of the ribs on the atlas of a diplodocine skull-and-three-cervicals exhibit that Matt and I saw at MOAL(*) back in the heady days of the Sauropocalypse. And that reminded me that I have other pairs of photos from the MOAL visit, which I took with the intention of making anaglyphs. like the one I did of the diplodocine.

Some of the Burpee Museum folks and PaleoFest speakers visited the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago after the 2020 ‘Fest. I hadn’t been there since 2012, and a lot had changed. More on that in future posts, maybe.

Before we get on to the home stretch of this series — which is turning out waaay longer than I expected it to be, and which I guess should really have been a paper instead — we need to resolve an important detail. We all know there are two scapulocoracoids in the BYU Supersaurus material, and that one of them is the holotype: but which one?

Having spent much of the last few days playing with the cervical vertebrae of a subadult apatosaur, and trying to make sense of those of the mounted adult, neck ontogeny is much on our minds. Here’s an example from the less charismatic half of Saurischia.

Left to right: Allosaurus fragilis, Apatosaurus louisae, Homo sapiens, Diplodocus carnegii.

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