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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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That’s FMNH PR 25107, better known as a the holotype of Brachiosaurus altithorax — the biggest known dinosaur at the time of its description (Riggs 1903) and still for my money one of the most elegant, along with its buddy and one-time genus-mate Giraffatitan brancai . I had a spare morning in Chicago two Tuesday ago, and Bill Simpson (collection manager of fossil vertebrates at the Field Museum) managed to fit it a collections
I have often lamented that there are so very few photos of the Field Museum’s Brachiosaurus mount from that brief six years — 1993 to 1999 — when it was the centrepiece of the main hall. It seems to have been kicked out just a year or two too early to get captured by numerous digital cameras.
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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.
A few sauropods have bifurcated cervical ribs. The most dramatic example that I know of is the turiasaur Moabosaurus (Britt et al. 2017). Mike and I got to see that material on the Sauropocalypse back in 2016, which is how we got the photo above.
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.
Brian Curtice, a long-time sauropod jockey who now runs Fossil Crates, was briefly in Price, Utah, last Friday to drop off an Eilenodon skull at the Prehistoric Museum. While he was there he snapped some photos of a new “Dippy” exhibition — reproduced here with permission.