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.

I was googling around some photos, confirming to myself that turtles don’t have cervical ribs, when I stumbled across this monstrosity (and when I use that word I mean it as a compliment): {.size-full .wp-image-20555 aria-describedby=“caption-attachment-20555” loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“20555” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2022/12/07/the-cylindrical-zygapophyses-of-trionyx-spinifera/trionyx_spinifera_1496_std/”

In a paper that I’m just finishing up now, we want to include this 1903 photo of Carnegie Museum personnel: {.alignnone .size-full .wp-image-20437 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“20437” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2022/11/08/who-is-who-in-this-1903-carnegie-museum-photo/hatcher-et-al-in-lab-1903/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2022/11/hatcher-et-al-in-lab-1903.jpg” orig-size=“2817,2285” comments-opened=“1”

I am co-authoring a manuscript that, among other things, tries to trace the history of the molds made by the Carnegie Museum in the early 1900s, from which they cast numerous replica skeletons of the Diplodocus carnegii mount (CM 84, CM 94, CM 307 and other contributing specimens). This turns out to be quite a mystery, and I have become fascinated by it. Below is the relevant section of the manuscript as it now stands.

We have many times been in the position of having the reference for a paper and wanting to find the full text. But I think this is a first: I have the full text of a paper, and I want to find the reference!

I have long intended to write a paper entitled Why Elephants Are So Small, as a companion piece to Why Giraffes Have Short Necks (Taylor and Wedel 2013). I’ve often discussed this project with Matt, usually under the acronym WEASS, and its substance has come up in the previous post, and especially Mickey Mortimer’s comment: That is exactly what the WEASS project was supposed to consist of: a list of many candidate limitations on how big animals

For this forthcoming Barosaurus paper, we would like to include an establishing photo of the AMNH Barosaurus mount. There are two strong candidate photos which we’ve used before in an SVPCA talk, but since this is a formal publication we need to be more careful about copyright.

Matt and I are writing a paper about Barosaurus cervicals (yes, again). Regular readers will recall that the best Barosaurus cervical material we have ever seen was in a prep lab for Western Paleo Labs.

I was looking more closely at the turkey skeleton from my recent post, and zeroed in on the last two dorsal (= thoracic) vertebrae. They articulate very well with each other and with the first vertebra of the sacrum, with the centra and zygapophyses both locking in so that there can only have been very little if any movement between them in life.

In mammals — certainly the most-studied vertebrates — regional differentiation of the vertebral column is distinct and easy to spot. But things aren’t so simple with sauropods.