A unique sauropod mount: Haplocanthosaurus delfsi CMNH 10380
January 23, 2025
Hatcher (1903a) gave a very brief description — two pages and no illustrations — of the new sauropod Haplocanthus, basing it and its type species H. priscus on the adult specimen CM 572. Later that year, having been notified that the genus name was preoccupied by a fish, he renamed it Haplocanthosaurus in a single-paragraph note (Hatcher 1903b).
Then in his monographic description later that same year (Hatcher 1903c), he also named a second species, H. utterbacki, based on the subadult specimen CM 879. McIntosh and Williams (1988:22) considered this to be synonymous with H. priscus, the differences noted by Hatcher being due to preparation (absence of hyposphenes) and ontogeny (fusion of sacral spines). This synonymy has been universally followed since.
Eighty-five years after Hatcher’s three papers, McIntosh and Williams (1988) described a new species of Haplocanthosaurus — H. delfsi — and this one has been accepted as valid. Their paper contains a photograph of the mounted skeleton in the Cleveland Museum:
What I didn’t realise until recently is that this is not how the skeleton was first exhibited at the museum. In an article about the new remount of this skeleton (its tail is off the floor at last!), Emily Driehaus writes that “by 1957, the team had fully excavated the dinosaur—and it was on display in the Museum by 1961”. And the article includes this photo:
I’ve never seen anything like this. I’ve seen plenty of regular mounts, and I’ve seen panel mounts where the bones are laid out on the ground as they may have been when they were found. And I’ve seen photos of the bizarre everted-elbowed Diplodocus in St. Petersburg. But never an exhibit like this, with the rib-cage complete and articulated, but sitting on the ground with the legs splayed out.
I wonder what the story was here? Did they get as far as building the torso, then run out of time or money? Were they trying for a possible sleeping posture? That doesn’t work at all: the femur would have been disarticulated in that posture, and the torso would need to be higher off the ground to allow space for the guts and gastralia.
Does anyone know any more about this?
Update (24 January 2024)
In a comment below, Matt Inabinett points to a Facebook post containing a photo of this exhibit under construction:
The accompanying text reads:
#TBT to the year 1959 and the mounting of our Late Jurassic sauropod, Haplocanthosaurus delfsi, nicknamed Happy! In life, this dinosaur was probably more than 72 feet long and 14 feet tall at the hips, with a weight of about 25 tons. Because of this tremendous mass, it’s anatomically impossible for a sauropod to be in this position without breaking all their joints…unless…😬🦖
Which could be construed as “unless killed by a theropod”, I guess, suggestion that the old mount might have been intended as a death pose.
(Note, by the way, that the 1959 date claimed for this photo doesn’t make a good match for the statement “it was on display in the Museum by 1961” in the article I first linked.)
References
- Hatcher, John B. 1903a. A new sauropod dinosaur from the Jurassic of Colorado. Proceedings of the Biology Society of Washington 16:1–2.
- Hatcher, John B. 1903b. A new name for the dinosaur Haplocanthus Hatcher. Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington 16:100.
- Hatcher, John B. 1903c. Osteology of Haplocanthosaurus with description of a new species, and remarks on the probable habits of the Sauropoda and the age and origin of the Atlantosaurus beds; additional remarks on Diplodocus. Memoirs of the Carnegie Museum 2:1–75 and plates I–VI.
- McIntosh, John S, and Michael E. Williams. 1988. A new species of sauropod dinosaur, Haplocanthosaurus delfsi sp. nov., from the Upper Jurassic Morrison Fm. of Colorado. Kirtlandia 43:3–26.
Nigersaurus in the mist
February 28, 2024
The best thing about collaborations is that I get to work with amazing colleagues from around the world. The second-best thing about collaborations is that I get to work on badass critters that I wouldn’t otherwise have access to, like sick* diplodocids, tiny saltasaurines, Triassic barely-dinosaurs, and — most recently — my first rebbachisaur (Windholz et al. 2024). I’d seen rebbachisaurs firsthand before, in a traveling exhibit and on the Isle of Wight — plus Xenoposeidon in the NHM collections (in 2005, well before NHMUK PV R2095 became Xeno) and secondhand in plastic — but this was my first time getting to work on one.
*Sick meaning ‘crazy cool‘ and also ‘hideously diseased‘.
I celebrated my advent as a rebbachisaur worker by treating myself to the Jurassic World Wild Roar Nigersaurus, which AFAIK is the only rebbachisaur to have yet been incarnated in toy form. There have been other, and frankly much more accurate, Nigersaurus toys (= figures) produced before — in particular, the duckbill-face on the JW Nigersaurus is less weird and extreme than Nigersaurus’s actual face — but I believe the JW Nigersaurus is the only one that makes noise.
Shortly after I got the JW Nigersaurus, we got a delivery of cold stuff, and I had some dry ice to play with. You know how that story ends.
Sadly, I didn’t think to put the plant in the mist until I had too little dry ice left to make a convincing fog. Until next time…
Reference
Two thoughts on blogging: thought archives, and bullets dodged
November 16, 2023
Brian Engh made this and posted it to FaceBook, writing, “Apropos of nothing here’s Mathew Wedel annihilating borderline parasitic theropods with the Bronto-Ischium of Eternal Retribution — a mythic energy weapon/sacred dinosaur ass-bone discovered by Uncle Jim Kirkland, now stored in Julia McHugh’s lair at Dinosaur Journey Fruita CO.”
I haven’t blogged about blogging in a while. Maybe because blogging already feels distinctly old-fashioned in the broader culture. A lot of the active discussion migrated away a long time ago, to Facebook and Twitter, and then to other social media outlets as each one in turn goes over the enshittification event horizon.
But I continue to think that if you’re an academic, it’s incredibly useful have a blog. I’ve thought this basically forever, but my reasons have changed over time. At first I only thought of a blog as a way to reach others — SV-POW! is a nice soapbox to stand on, occasionally, and it funnels attention toward our papers, which is always nice. Over time I came to realize that a huge part of the value of SV-POW! is as a venue for Mike and me to bat ideas around in. It’s basically our paleo playpen and idea incubator (I wrote a bit about this in my 2018 wrap-up post — already semi-ancient by digital standards!).
More recently I’ve come to realize another part of the value of SV-POW! to me, apart from anyone else on the planet: it’s an archive for my thoughts. If I want to find out what I was thinking about 10 or 15 years ago, I can just go look. And at this point, there is far too much stuff on SV-POW! for either Mike or me to remember it, so we regularly rediscover interesting and occasionally promising observations and ideas while trawling through our own archives.
One of the best pieces of advice I ever got was from Nick Czaplewski, who was a curator at OMNH when I was starting out and for many years thereafter. He told me that you end up writing papers not only to your colleagues but also to your future self, because there’s no way you’re going to remember all the work you’ve done, all the ideas you’ve had, all the hypotheses you’ve tested, and so your published output is going to become a sort of external memory store for your future self. I’ve always found that to be true, and it’s even more true of SV-POW! than it is for any one of my papers, because SV-POW! is vast and ever-evolving.
Created by Stanley Wankel, also from Facebook.
I’ll preface what comes next by acknowledging that I’m speaking from a place of privilege (and not just because I have friends with image-editing software and senses of humor). Broadly, because I’m a cis-het white dude who had a fairly ridiculous string of opportunities come his way (like these and these), but also narrowly in that I’m not trying to make a name for myself right now. I have the freedom to not engage with social media. I never got on Twitter (bullet dodged), and I don’t plan on joining any of the Twitter-alikes (my life is already full, and I already struggle enough with online attention capture). I’m only on Facebook to keep in touch with a few folks I can’t easily reach otherwise, and to promote papers when they come out (because I want to, not because I feel any pressure to). And, frankly, at this point I expect every social media outlet to decay, so my motivation to invest in whatever’s next is minimal.
So, while I’m a definite social media skeptic at this point, I’m alert to the fact that people just coming into the field may want or even need to engage on the new platforms, because they don’t have the option of starting a reasonably popular paleo blog in 2007. But I still think it’s useful to have a blog, precisely because social media platforms decay, and because the conversations that happen on them are so ephemeral. Theoretically you could go back and see what you were saying on Twitter or Facebook 10 years ago, but they don’t make it easy, and why would you? (And good luck doing the same with Google Plus.) So I think if I was starting out at this point, I’d still have a blog, and every time I wrote something substantial or at least interesting on the platform du jour, I’d copy and paste it into a blog post. It might reach a few more folks, or different ones; it might start different conversations; but minimally it would be a way to record my thoughts for my own future self.
I’m curious if anyone else finds that reasoning compelling. It will be interesting to come back in 10 years and see if I still think the same. At least when that time comes, I’ll know where to come to find out what I was thinking in late 2023, and I’ll be able to (provided WordPress doesn’t mysteriously fail between now and then).
My other thought for the day is that SV-POW! has survived in part by dodging a few specific bullets. The first was exhaustion — after blogging weekly for over two years, we decided that we wouldn’t even attempt a weekly schedule anymore, and just blog when we felt like it (2018 was, by intention, an odd year out, and we haven’t repeated that experiment). The second was over-specialization. For the first couple of years we worked a sauropod vertebra into just about every post, and if we blogged about something off-topic, we flagged it as such. Over time the blog evolved into “Mike and Matt yap about stuff”, like how to make your own anatomical preparations, and — most notably — open-access publishing and science communication. I think that’s been crucial for the blog’s survival — Mike and I both chafe at restrictions, even ones we set for ourselves, and it’s nice to able to fire up a WordPress draft and just let the thoughts spill out, whether they have to do with sauropods or not.
Another Stanley Wankel creation. Gareth Monger commented that the band name was ZooZoo Tet, which is instantly, totally, unimpeachably correct.
A third bullet, which I’d nearly forgotten about, was blog-network capture. As I was going back through my Gmail archive (my other digital thought receptacle) in search of the origins of the “Morrison bites” paper (see last post), I ran into discussions with Darren with about Tetrapod Zoology moving from ScienceBlogs to the Scientific American Blog Network. I had completely forgotten that back when the big professional science-blogging networks were a thing, I had a secret longing that SV-POW! would be invited. But they all either imploded (ScienceBlogs) or became fatally reader-unfriendly (SciAm, at least for TetZoo*), and now I look back and think “Holy crap I’m glad we were never asked.” Because even if those networks didn’t implode or enshittify, they’d have wanted us to blog on time and on topic, and both of those things would have killed SV-POW!
*If you are on SciAm, or read any of their blogs, and like them: great. I’m glad it’s working out for you. It didn’t for the only SciAm blog I cared about.
So really both my points are sides of a single coin: have a digital space of your own to keep your thoughts, even if only for your future self, and don’t tie that space to anything more demanding or ephemeral than a website-hosting service.
I’m not 100% sure what this is, but it exists
October 8, 2022
Darren, the silent partner at SV-POW!, pointed me to this tweet by Duc de Vinney, displaying a tableau of “A bunch of Boners (people who study bones) Not just paleontologists, some naturalists and cryptozoologists too”, apparently commissioned by @EDGEinthewild:
As you can see, Darren, Matt and I (as well as long-time Friend Of SV-POW! Mark Witton) somehow all made it into the cartoon, ahead of numerous far more deserving people. Whatever the criterion was, and whatever reason Edge In The Wild had for wanting this, I am delighted to be included alongside the likes of Owen, Osborn, Cope, Marsh, and Bob Bakker. Even if the caricatures are not especially flattering.
Here is an edit showing only the three of us, which I am sure I will find many fruitful uses for:
My thanks to Duc de Vinney for creating this!
Happy 15th birthday to SV-POW!
October 1, 2022
Matt and I, with our silent partner Darren, started SV-POW! fifteen years ago to the day, as a sort of jokey riff on NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day. Our first post, on 1 October 2007, was a photograph of what we called “the most iconic of sauropod vertebrae, the 8th cervical of the Brachiosaurus brancai type specimen HMN SII”. Now, here in glorious monochrome, is that same vertebra fifteen years on!
(The specimen that it’s from is now recognised as belonging to the separate brachiosaurid genus Giraffatitan, and it’s the paralectotype of the species Giraffatitan brancai.)
Obviously what we’re seeing here is not the real thing — very heavy and very fragile — but a life-sized 3D model, carved out of styrofoam by a CNC machine (computerized carving machine) using surface-scan data of the original specimen. This was done at Research Casting International, and we bring you this photo courtesy of Peter May, Garth Dallman, and the rest of the folks at RCI.
The inside of RCI’s workshop is an interesting place — I’ve never been there myself, but it’s at least Matt’s second visit, and it’s very high on my To Visit list. I especially like the “RAPTOR” box just behind and above Matt’s head.
This photo, unfortunately, makes the vertebra look smaller than it is, because when Matt took the selfie he was holding it further back than his own head. It’s still interesting, though, to see where the balance point is for holding it one-handed. It seems that the rear half of the vertebra is denser than the front half. But of course, that’s only when it’s a solid constant-density volume. The real bone, with all its pneumatic internal structures, might have been quite different.
Needless to say, HMN SII:C8 (or MB.R.2181:C8, as we must now call it) is a very old friend on this blog, to the point where it should probably have a category of its own. Among many other appearances it’s popped up in tutorials 2 (Basic vertebral anatomy), 4 (Laminae) and 21 (How to measure the length of a centrum), as well as Bifid Brachiosaurs, Batman! (6 September 2009), What a 23% longer torso looks like (20 September 2009), Plateosaurus is pathetic and its doppelganger Plateosaurus is comical (16 January and 5 September 2013), and of course Copyright: promoting the Progress of Science and useful Arts by preventing access to 105-year-old quarry maps (11 October 2015).
If you want to see more exciting photos of this glorious vertebra — and indeed of many other sauropod vertebrae — stay tuned for the next fifteen years!
A sauropod on Mars
February 24, 2021
This is old news, for those who have been following NASA’s Perseverance rover since before it left Earth, and it’s also not my find–my friend, colleague, and sometime co-author Brian Kraatz send me a heads-up about it this morning.
NASA posted the image above a couple of days ago, in a post called “Mastcam-Z looks at its calibration target“. If you zoom in, you can just make out a tiny silhouette of a sauropod on the ring around the MarsDial (what we call a sundial on Mars).
Here’s a much clearer pre-launch image from the Planetary Society (link), which helped design the calibration targets. Starting at about 7:00 and going around clockwise, there’s an image of the inner Solar System, with the Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars, then DNA, bacteria, a fern, a sauropod, humans (same silhouettes as on the Pioneer probes), a retro-style rocket ship, and finally a motto, “Two worlds, one beginning”, which may be a sly nod to the hypothesis that life in the inner Solar System started on Mars and was later seeded to Earth on meteorites–or possibly vice versa.
What’s with all this bling? It’s all about calibrating the cameras on Perseverance. The MarsDial gives the position and angle of the sun, and the colored dots help calibrate the color output of the cameras. There are other calibration targets for other cameras on board Perseverance, as well as some other technological ‘Easter eggs’ from the folks who designed and built the rover–read more about them here (link).
Perseverance is up there to explore “the potential of Mars as a place for life” (source), both past and future. Its four science objectives are:
- Looking for Habitability: Identify past environments capable of supporting microbial life.
- Seeking Biosignatures: Seek signs of possible past microbial life in those habitable environments, particularly in special rocks known to preserve signs of life over time.
- Caching Samples: Collect core rock and “soil” samples and store them on the Martian surface. [For a future sample-return mission.–MJW]
- Preparing for Humans: Test oxygen production from the Martian atmosphere.
Personally, I have my fingers firmly crossed that Perseverance finds something like this sticking out of a Martian rock:
(That one is actually from Utah, not Mars–see this post.) I don’t see any other way that my particular skill set is going to contribute to the exploration of the Solar System, which I’d really like to do. So I’ll wait, and watch Perseverance send back pictures, and wait some more. Sigh.
Anyway, there’s at least one sauropod on Mars, and that will have to do (for now!).
Bonus: if you haven’t watched the video of the rocket skycrane delivering the car-sized Perseverance to the surface of Mars, you need to. And if you have watched it, who cares, watch it again:
How stupid was the neck of Camarasaurus?
February 19, 2021
What if I told you that when Matt was in BYU collections a while ago, he stumbled across a cervical vertebra — one labelled DM/90 CVR 3+4, say — that looked like this in anterior view?
I think you would say something like “That looks like a Camarasaurus cervical, resembling as it does those illustrated in the beautiful plates of Osborn and Mook (1921)”. And then you might show me, for example, the left half of Plate LXII:
And then you might think to yourself that, within its fleshy envelope, this vertebra might have looked a bit like this, in a roughly circular neck:
Reasonable enough, right?
But when what if I then told you that in fact the vertebra was twice this wide relative to its height, and looked like this?
I’m guessing you might say “I don’t believe this is real. You must have produced it by stretching the real photo”. To which I would reply “No no, hypothetical interlocutor, the opposite is the case! I squashed the real photo — this one — to produce the more credible-seeming one at the top of the post”.
You would then demand to see proper photographic evidence, and I would respond by posting these three images (which Matt supplied from his 2019 BYU visit):
BYU specimen DM/90 CVR 3+4, cervical vertebra of ?Camarasaurus in anterior view. This is the photo from which the illustration above was extracted.
The same specimen in anteroventral view.
The same specimen in something approaching ventral view.
So what’s going on here? My first thought was that this speicmen has to have been dorsoventrally crushed — that this can’t be the true shape.
And yet … counterpoint: the processes don’t look crushed: check out the really nice 3d preservation of the neural spine metapophyses, the prezygs, the transverse processes, the nice, rounded parapophyseal rami, and even the ventral aspect of the centrum. This vertebra is actually in pretty good condition.
So is this real? Is this the vertebra more or less as it was in life? And if so, does that mean that the flesh envelope looked like this?
Look, I’m not saying it isn’t ridiculous; I’m just saying this seems to be more or less where the evidence is pointing. We’ve made a big deal about how the necks of apatosaurines were more or less triangular in cross-section, rather than round as has often been assumed; perhaps we need to start thinking about whether some camarasaur necks were squashed ovals in cross section?
Part of what’s crazy here is that this makes no mechanical sense. A cantilevered structure, such as a sauropod neck, needs to be tall rather than wide in order to attain good mechanical advantage that can take the stress imposed by the neck’s weight. A broad neck is silly: it adds mass that needs to be carried without providing high anchors for the tension members. Yet this is what we see. Evolution doesn’t always do what we would expect it to do — and it goes off the rails when sexual selection comes into play. Maybe female camarasaurus were just really into wide-necked males?
Final note: I have been playing fast and loose with the genus name Camarasaurus and the broader, vaguer term camarasaur. Matt and I have long felt (without having made any real attempt to justify this feeling) that Camarasaurus is way over-lumped, and probably contains multiple rather different animals. Maybe there is a flat-necked species in among them?
(Or maybe it’s just crushing.)
My Oddbins corkscrew resembles a titanosaur femur
December 19, 2020
These things just catch my eye, I can’t help it.
Left: Oddbins corkscrew, circa 1997. Right: left femur of Patagotitan mayorum, circa 100,000,000 BC.
Note that the corkscrew features a distinct medially directed femoral head, the bulge in the lateral margin of the proximal portion that is characteristic of titanosaurs, and a straight shaft. OK, it’s missing tibial and fibular condyles at the distant end, but you can’t have everything.
The stupidest head
August 21, 2019
Left: Homo sapiens, head, neck and upper trunk in right lateral view (unprepared specimen). Right: Camarasaurus sp., skull in left lateral view. Photograph at the Natural History Museum of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah. 2016.
Don’t touch the casts! Touch the bones!
July 16, 2019
Here’s a piece of signage from the wonderful Dinosaur National Monument, which we visited on the 2016 Sauropocalypse.
And in close-up:
This is the first and only time I’ve been encouraged to touch real dinosaur bones on the basis that a cast of them was too fragile.
Happily, we did have some great experiences with the actual fossils. Here is Matt, inspecting part of the wall, while our host Dan Chure documents the moment and the cotyle of a convenient ?Camarasaurus cervical acts as a receptacle for the cameras not in use at that point.
Above us, on the balcony, tourists wonder at such astonishingly massive creatures, and their ability to navigate a wall of fossils.
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 
