THE PALEO KING

WARNING: ACT NOW OR FACE CENSORSHIP!

2012-01-17T22:11:00.000-08:00

PLEASE READ THIS VERY CAREFULLY.

I decided when I started this blog that it would be devoted to science, not politics. But politics has interfered in the future of the blogosphere in a very nasty way. And no other paleo-bloggers seem to be speaking out on this.

The good-for-nothing U.S. congress with its self-serving members and their 80% public DISapproval ratings is trying to ram through two bills into law which would decimate the freedom of the internet under the deceptive auspices of stopping piracy. ANY site or blog which links to other sites that contain copyrighted material could be falsely banned or shut down under the draconian provisions of the PIPA and SOPA acts, and bloggers like myself and many of us in the Paleo-blogosphere may be forced to shut down because of over-reaching government meddling in private rights of citizens. ANY activity relating to links to another site or posting material from other websites for mere educational non-profit purposes could be construed as a "copyright infringement" even if properly attributed to its authors, and may result in lawsuits, harassment, and even indefinite arrest under false charges of "piracy" without access to any legal representation.

In addition, many internet programmers and companies will be crippled by all the convoluted clauses of these bills which allow government to interfere at any point in the delivery of online content to consumers. It will damage the economy even further than foolish wars and corrupt bank bailouts, to the point that most businesses that advertise or sell online will end up having to spend even more money on lawyers to cover their backsides and fight arbitrary censorship, this time against unscrupulous FCC cronies and their Wall Street paymasters. That’s why AOL, EBay, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Mozilla, Twitter, Yahoo and Zynga wrote a letter to Congress protesting the bills, saying these bills “pose a serious risk to our industry’s continued track record of innovation and job-creation.” And small businesses, which make up the bulk of the private sector, will be forced to close their doors or suspend their websites altogether due to prohibitively high legal costs of warding off frivolous government accusations of "piracy", laying off millions more employees in the long run. More than 200 entrepreneurs have slammed these bills as dangerous to the economy and destructive to innovation and job growth. And the brain-dead pork barrel congressmen and women (who seem to keep getting re-elected despite their dismal track records) want to tell us that THIS is the freedom that we need to export to the rest of the world on the back of tanks and Apache helicopters? I didn't vote for this Orwellian crap. Nobody was given a choice.

And the worst part is that these bills were written by ignorant lazy media conglomerate shills who don't even have a clue how the internet works. You can tell just based on the vague language of the things how these politicians are totally behind the times and are trying to police the web based on intrusive stone-age protocols. Half of them don't even know what twitter is and are trying to convince the country that dinosaurs and humans lived together in Eden. And they're trying to claim they know better than you and me what needs to be done with technology. What's more, their sad excuses for anti-piracy legislation are USELESS at stopping online piracy.

For those of you outside of America, don't think that this problem doesn't involve you. Whatever the United States government can get away with in domestic economic policy, the rest of the world will likely follow suit, if not do even worse. The problem of government censorship of the internet could very well spread to your shores if it is not stopped while it's still just here.

PLEASE SIGN THIS PETITION on Google's website to tell Congress that you are not just going to sit there and swallow their coercion like a fool. Censorship does not belong on the internet. And neither does the act of collectively punishing the entire web for the acts of a few software pirates. If you do nothing... then welcome to Oceania.

P.S. this post is meant to criticize the draconian broad-brush punishment favored by your congressmen/women, not to defend the crime. I am not advocating piracy of any sort. However the PIPA and SOPA bills are not a solution to the pirate problem, and they are actually creating far worse hardships for the economy and threatening liberty itself.

P.P.S. to all those deluded teabagger neocons out there who think this is 100% Obama's fault - it's congress that wrote these bills, and none of your wall street-funded candidates has done anything to stop them so far either, despite all their empty promises to "shrink government" and "reduce intrusive regulations on business".
(BTW I'm not referring to Ron Paul here, he's the furthest thing from a neocon or corporate lackey.)

Rethinking "Brouhaha-saurus" - what if it were real?

2012-01-07T17:10:00.000-08:00

The previous post on Bruhathkayosaurus has given me some thoughts on an interesting possibility: what if this animal were indeed real?

It's no secret that I'm seriously skeptical of the remains that Yadagiri and Ayyasami found in 1989 and labeled as "Bruhathkayosaurus". First they identified it as a very large predator, then later on others suggested it must be a plant-eating sauropod, and probably a titanosaur at that. Most of these theories are pure conjecture. But from the size of the remains it really only makes sense that if this animal were real, it would have to be a sauropod.

But how should we interpret these remains, which are now the lost victims of a monsoon flood? The discoverers are notorious for describing stuff that isn't what seemed at first. Dravidosaurus, the supposed Late Cretaceous "lazarus" stegosaur, really turned out to be a very badly eroded and fragmentary plesiosaur. The alleged stegosaur back plates were really the sternals of a marine reptile, so weathered as to be barely identifiable at all.

Is Bruhathkayosaurus similarly misidentified? Might it be a chimera of unrelated animals, or, as was the case with Dravidosaurus, not a dinosaur at all? Some have suggested it might even be petrified wood. And sole testimony of its authenticity rests with Dr. Sankar Chatterjee, who himself has incorrectly described (and some might even say largely invented) a number of extinct creatures known from very poor and dubious material (notably Protoavis).

But what if? What if Bruhathkayosaurus really was authentic and a titanosaur at that? What might it look like?

The photos reveal little, and need some guesswork to interpret. Here's Steve O'Connor's take:

The red-tinted areas are the bones. The top of the hip socket it easily visible (if a bit oddly triangular) in the second photo. The front end of the ilium is broken off, but would be to the left of the second photo (regardless of what the confusing and likely incorrect captions seem to say - there should not be hip socket processes sticking out of the top or rear of an ilium!).

Here is the material without tinting, and with my own interpretation of the outlines and corrected captions under the original ones:

And finally with tinting of different areas:

There seems to be some sacrum material in the photos that wasn't initially identified. Sacral ribs at least. The green area is an unusual bit of bone or some other substance which is not part of the hip structure. The ilium, unusually, has a very long posterior shelf. It's elongated almost into a cylinder. There are few sauropods that have hips like this, and the one that immediately comes to mind is an undoubtedly bizarre one - Opisthocoelicaudia.

Opisthocoelicaudia skarzynskii - skeletal by Jaime Headden

The ilium shelf in Opisthocoelicaudia is strangely similar to that of a tyrannosaur in general shape - long, low, and with a substantial rear process not seen in many titanosaurian sauropods. This may have something to do with Yadagiri and Ayyasami's initial identification of the material as a giant theropod.

T. rex skeletal (based on AMNH specimen) by Greg Paul. Posted for informational purposes only.

Indeed there IS a bizarre parallel between the rear shelf process in that T .rex ilium and the one for Bruhathkayosaurus. But I doubt "big Bru" was anything other than a plant-eating sauropod. the anterior process of the ilium's hip socket is elongated similarly to Alamosaurus, and most titanosaurs and brachiosaurs, rather than resembling the short anterior socket process in theropods. The ilium was described as 1200mm long, larger than that of Giraffatitan, which makes anything other than a sauropod identity next to impossible.

However, it's not certain if this length of 1200mm refers to the portion of the ilium which was recovered, or to the likely size of the whole thing. In any case, though large, such a length for the ilium makes it very unlikely that Bruhathkayosaurus was anything close to the biggest dinosaur. Indeed, the hips of "Brachiosaurus" nougaredi were 1300mm long not including the missing first sacral vertebra, and would have been at least 1500mm long when complete. So from one point of view Bruhathkayosaurus may not have all that big. For comparison, the ilia of the holotype of Argentinosaurus, when complete, would have been around 1800mm (though the sacral centra would have been shorter at around 1300mm width of the Argentinosaurus hips could have been as much as 3000mm or 10 feet). However, even given those numbers, it's likely that Bruhathkayosaurus, if it existed, was still a very large animal of Argyrosaurus or Paralititan class.

The "tibia" was estimated at 2000mm, which is unusually large to go with tie ilium. If it's a real bone (and not, as I suspect, petrified wood), then it may belong to a different dinosaur, something far larger. Even the tibia of Argentinosaurus doesn't come close to 2m, so the figure could be grossly overinflated or not valid at all. But whatever it is, the "tibia" is not likely to belong to the same animal as the ilium. There is other material supposedly found at the site: a caudal centrum 750mm wide - downright huge even by the standards of Argentinosaurus and Puertasaurus vertebrae - and a partial femur with a condylar width of 750 mm and a shaft width of 450 mm. According to Zach Armstrong,

"The femoral condyle width was 750 mm, compared to in Giraffatitan, where it is about 580 mm (going off of drawings by Janensch in Taylor (2009)). This means the Bruhathkayosaurus femur was about 1.28 times as long, assuming if we scale roughly off of that, then Bruhathkayosaurus was about 2.1 times has heavy, or roughly 67 tonnes. Again, far from being the largest dinosaur, and also shows why going off of appendicular proportions can be quite misleading."

67 tonnes (which I assume is based on admittedly error-prone limb bone allometry equations) is not too far from my 70-ton estimate for adult Argyrosaurus, which overall would have been about 15-20 feet longer than Giraffatitan HMN SII and about twice as massive due to its far more robust proportions.

So basically what we appear to have is an ilium and partial femur that belonged to an Argyrosaurus-sized animal with Opisthocoelicaudia-type body design, along with a caudal vertebra and a "tibia" from a much larger creature, both of which are currently labeled Bruhathkayosaurus, and no longer exist even as fossils. If, that is, they can be trusted to be real. I have never seen a picture of the caudal vertebra OR the femur, though the dimensions of the femur are at least a bit more believable. The two different-sized sauropods (assuming the larger one is valid at all) could just as well be two unrelated animals as different-aged individuals of the same species.

The ilium and femur are definitely not from the biggest dinosaur yet known. But the tibia and caudal centrum could be, if both were legit remains. Problem is, we may never know, as it's all been washed away and destroyed. Dr. Ayyasami reportedly told Armstrong: "Only thing is that I did not visit the site again to check for further bone collection. I may do so next year as I plan for a visit to the Cretaceous of Ariyalur." We all anticipate the results, though given how these things usually go and stretch out over many years just to prepare for in places like India, Dr. Ayyasami's expedition may not materialize anytime soon. If and when it does, I highly suggest that this time he take a digital camera with spare batteries, and invite a real artist along to sketch the bones for good measure. So that we may have better drawings to go on than this embarrassing scrawl:

The Giant that Never Was: All your Bruhathkayosaurus questions answered!

2012-01-01T20:48:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year, everyone! A lot of new dinosaur discoveries in 2011, and 2012 promises to be even better. BHI's dueling dinosaurs (a large Nanotyrannus and a previously unknown chasmosaurine ceratopsid) await description, and there several remains of Chinese theropods contemporary with the Ruyang/Liudian sauropod fauna that have yet to be described. "Xinghesaurus", "Liaoningotitan", and "Nurosaurus" round out the list of sauropods mounted but not formally described or named, and of course there are those colossal French titanosaurs popping out of the hills of Champagne.

But for all the new discoveries coming out of the woodwork, there is one that must be laid to rest and buried. For all the fans of giant sauropods, this is disappointing news, but not altogether unexpected. Bruhathkayosaurus, long considered the biggest or second-biggest dinosaur, is NO MORE. Whatever little evidence of it there was, is now completely gone, and so barring the discovery of another specimen, it will never be studied and its purported dimensions can't be verified. I have a lot of people asking me "what about Bruhathkayosaurus?!" since I posted my list of obscure giant dinosaurs, and I also get that question every time I say "Puertasaurus (and now Alamosaurus too) is the biggest dinosaur we have rock-solid physical evidence for as of NOW." So I'm doing this post on Bruhathkayosaurus to clear up all the questions about this bizarre case of skullduggery and sasquatch-sensationalism trumping hard science.

Personally I am beyond skeptical about this animal's validity, (in my view it's a hundred times more dubious than even the long-lost Amphicoelias fragillimus) but before I explain my reasons, take a look below at Matt Martyniuk's blog post on this mythical super-sauropod from December 21. (reposted below):

Bruhathkayosaurus is Dead. Again.

Above: Working sketches for a speculative B. matleyi reconstruction by Steve O'Connor. Click here for Steve's final drawing.

I don't know how common this knowledge is, but this is the first I've heard of it so humor me while I mourn the possibility of ever re-assessing the intriguingly large sauropod specimen known as Bruthathkayosaurus matleyi.

B. matleyi was known from fragmentary remains of the pelvis and limb bones found in the Tiruchirappalli district of Tamil Nadu, India. It was first described by Yadagiri and Ayyasami in 1989 as species of giant allosauroid. This classification was widely doubted online, but little follow-up work was ever done. The initial description is widely regarded as exceedingly poor in quality and not much can be discerned about the specimen due to poorly detailed drawings and insufficient text. Tom Holtz has even stated that "the hypothesis that this is no more than petrified wood has not been falsified yet to my satisfaction." However, Mickey Mortimer later noted that the tree trunk hypothesis "is questionable given the non-cylindrical bones preserved such as the ilium. Additionally, Chatterjee has personally examined the fossils, and while he has a bad record of misidentifying taxa, I give him enough credit to not confuse a tree for a limb bone."

Sankar Chatterjee did indeed apparently examine the material and told George Olshevsky and Tracy Ford that he believed it to be a titanosaur, as reported in 1999 here.

Holtz responded to these appeals by noting that "not all units are the Dinosaur Park or the Djadokhta. In some preservation is really, really, really crappy. You might get all sorts of autogenic growth on the fossils, or alteration of the original material. In outcrops like that, it isn't out of the question to be fooled into thinking bone is wood and vice versa, especially from simple superficial appearances. This is why a section of the fossil would help resolve if it is bone or wood." So, there's that. We'll now never be able to take that section.

While B. matleyi was a near-mythical celebrity among "semi-apocryphal gigapods", its legend loomed larger than (published) reality. While most online sources (such as the DML posts quoted above) had long since agreed that the specimen was probably a gigantic sauropod and not a gigantic carnosaur, no actual published reference to the species as a sauropod existed until five years ago (Krause et al. 2006).

And what a sauropod it was, maybe! Obviously with such a paltry footprint on the scientific literature, reliable size estimates for such a poorly described specimen are hard to come by. Luckily, some researchers have done the best they could with the available data and determined that, if B. matleyi was indeed a titanosaur with similar proportions to say, Argentinosaurus, it would have been very large indeed. Matt Wedel over at SV-POW has estimated the size of this animal in life at 139 tons. Mickey Mortimer has estimated its length at up to 34 meters. That would position it as one of the largest species of land animals ever, second only to Amphicoelias fragillimus, possibly.

And now, it appears that B. matleyi has suffered the same fate as its atlantosauroid rival for the record. In the comments at another SV-POW post about semi-apocryphal gigapods, Wedel reports that the type and only specimen of B. matleyi was at some point washed away in a flood. Any hope of verifying the stupefying claims about this species' size now seem to be lost. And unlike A. fragilimus, which was described and well-illustrated by a mostly reputable source with no obvious errors, the poor state of the B. matleyi description will forever doom this creature to the realm of dubious claims. After all, given the poor state of the description, it seems possible that a simple scale bar error or other mix-up could have tainted the data, and therefore all of our size estimates.

So here's to Bruthathkayosaurus matleyi, a beast (or possibly, a tree?) that died 70 million years ago, raised its spectral head (or crown?) again for one tantalizing moment and then, like Hitchcock's Ornithichnites, sunk back beneath the earth before we could really learn anything about it.

The only known photograph of Dr. Ayyasami, who along with his colleague Yadagiri,

described Bruhathkayosaurus and the similarly over-hyped and misidentified Dravidosaurus.

In fact there is some more to this story...

The rumors of the Bruhathkayosaurus material being washed away in a monsoon are confirmed here: Zach Armstrong has confirmed with Dr. Ayyasami that the remains were lost in floodwaters..

"From email correspondence with Dr. Ayyasami, it appears that the material was never actually properly prepared and was left exposed to the elements so when heavy monsoon rains struck the region the fossils were carried away in the rains. He says that the material was definitely dinosaurian in nature, and apparently Dr. Sankar Chatterjee also was able to confirm its dinosaurian (and apparently, titanosaurian) nature. However, as you note, both of these guys have not had the best track record in identifying fossils."

My reactions to the remains having disappeared was hot.

"Why did Ayyasami not prevent the loss of this material, surely if he believes it was one of the biggest dinosaurs it would be valuable enough NOT to repeat what Cope allowed to happen with Amphicoelias fragillimus!

I know you're not supposed to take this stuff personally in Paleontology, but I'm honestly furious with the guy for not taking any photos or even making a good DETAILED drawing of the bones. Seriously, is film that expensive? It wasn't too costly for Lydekker to take photos of Argyrosaurus way back in 1893! I doubt Yadagiri and Ayyasami didn't have any access to a camera, especially considering how much press coverage their discovery got, even up through the 90s. It's like the people who prepared this thing just didn't care. I'm beginning to fear the whole thing may be a hoax taxon. Like over 95% of the other titanosaur material dug up India and Pakistan.... sadly...

This wouldn't be the first time Yadagiri and Ayyasami pulled this kind of thing either. Dravidosaurus was another one of their bogus "dinosaur" discoveries. It turned out to be some battered barely recognizable scraps of marine reptile - probably a plesiosaur - but they claimed for certain that it was the last surviving stegosaur, lasting well into the Cretaceous! Have these guys EVER dug up anything legit?"

Apparently not. It seems their only published discoveries were Bruhathkayosaurus and Dravidosaurus, both possible hoaxes which are anything but what they seemed to be. Though Yadagiri and Ayyasami actually DID take some photographs of "Big Bru", as I later found out - it's just that these SUCK. And since 1989 apparently no other photographs have been taken of the remains, leaving us to boggled figure out just what the heck they were spending film on:

You can't really make out much of anything, it's hard to tell in the first two photos if you re actually seeing an ilium or just some random bits of rock, bone and petrified wood thrown together. The bottom photo (supposedly of a tibia) doesn't actually seem to show much of anything. The remains are so badly weathered that Yadagiri and Ayyasami originally described this animal as a meat-eating theropod before they decided it was really a sauropod. I mean if you can make that kind of mistake so easily despite having a PhD in paleontology/biology/geosciences, then either you're really starved for good specimens (or fame/fortune/funding) - or a PhD simply doesn't mean what it once did.

Also it's apparent that they never actually removed the fossils from the ground, let alone brought them back to the lab for study. The fossils were not transported to the nearest museum, they were just left in the ground (the intent probably being indefinitely).

To quote Mickey Mortimer:

"Very interesting to learn the material was washed away. So not only were the authors terrible at drawing and describing, they didn't even try collecting the specimens..."

It's frustrating to learn that the material is gone. Based on the images in the description it's not even certain the supposed 2m long 'tibia' was a tibia.

What's more, Dr. Sankar Chatterjee, who looked at the material and claimed it's real and a titanosaur, doesn't exactly have the best record of identifying dinosaurs correctly either. A lot of his discoveries are based on very shoddy material, and most of the time he got the identity of the animal wrong. Such as the following cases:

*Shuvosaurus - named for his son, Chatterjee described it as a Triassic ornithomomid (I know, sounds bizarre... considering even basal maniraptorans didn't evolve until late Jurassic times) - It turns out Shuvosaurus wasn't a dinosaur at all, but a rauisuchian - something much more closely related to modern crocodiles. Few recent descriptions of new fossil taxa have been that far off the mark.

* Technosaurus - this strangely named creature was initially labeled as a basal ornithischian by Chatterjee, something similar to Fabrosaurus perhaps. It was actually a chimera of at least three different animals: a "prosauropod", a Shuvosaurus, and finally jaw fragments that could be from just about any random archosaur. None of the bones fit Chatterjee's description as an ornithischian dinosaur.

* Alwalkeria - Chatterjee's diagnosis as a theropod was wrong, and its unserrated, unspecialized teeth make it either a very basal dinosaur (similar to Tawa or Eoraptor) more primitive than theropods or any of the later major groups - or perhaps put it outside of dinosauria altogether.

* Protoavis - the infamous "bird before the first bird", which Chatterjee claimed pushed the origin of birds back to the Triassic, far before that of Archaeopteryx, and supposedly meant that birds, rather than evolving from dinosaurs, only shared a common ancestor with them. The claim made Chatterjee an overnight celebrity and lightning rod in the scientific arena, and Feduccia and the other BANDits instantly ate it up. But Protoavis was based on a few very badly worn fragments, so that even the likes of Phil Currie and Greg Paul can't agree on what it really was. We do know it wasn't a bird though. There's no trace of feathers, nor any uniquely avian features. The known remains (such as can be identified) are very "reptilian" in form. Possibly it's a chimera of bits of early dinosaurs, lizards, crocodylomorphs, and other assorted odds and ends. Chatterjee got a lot of media attention for this artificial creature, but after a while the story just evaporated and Protoavis - nothing more than some beat-up fragments just barely recognizable as archosaur bones - was largely forgotten. There's really nothing in the (very crappy) fossil material to identify it definitively as anything beyond a generic archosaur, let alone pinpoint it as a bird.

In his definitive analysis of the material, The Rise of Birds (1997),Chatterjee failed to illustrate the Protoavis fossils via pictures or sketches of the fossils proper, and instead offers the reader artistic reconstructions. For this, Chatterjee has been sharply criticized. Such an approach is unscientific in that it idealizes the material at hand, and obscures the very fragmentary nature of the fossils, and their poor state of preservation. Today most paleontologists consider Protoavis totally invalid.

The very same could be said for Ayyasami's crude and stylized drawings of the bones of Bruhathkayosaurus.

And Chatterjee, for all his years as a professor, is not exactly a titanosaur specialist. He has never described a single titanosaur, not even as a co-author. Most of his research is in little broken-up pieces of Triassic archosaurs that may not be dinosaurs at all. I'm not sure how well he'd be able to identify titanosaur remains beyond the need for a second opinion, considering how poorly he's done with the critters for which he DOES have years of experience under his belt. Unfortunately his opinion is all we have, since the bones of Bruhathkayosaurus are gone forever.

Frankly, the bizarre narrow opening of the hip socket indicates the entire ilium may be a false construct. And in fact the entire socket seems to be constructed of two separate fragments. For all we know they could have been found hundreds of feet apart and have no relation to each other or to the upper shelf of the "ilium". The tibia is so blurry in the photograph that it may just be some small ridges of rock that happen to form a rough pattern.

I believe Bruhathkayosarus is either a hoax or a very hastily cobbled chimera of things which were never properly identified. How convenient for the authors that the thing just lay around outdoors for years and got washed away with no high-resolution photos ever taken. Oh it WAS the biggest dinosaur, we found it alright. Where is it? Oh well after two decades of leaving in the ground, we lost it in a monsoon, so sorry. But you should have been there to see it, Watson. You should have seen it!

Laugh me a river. For anyone that still wants to believe that Bruhathkayosaurus was for real, and a bona fide titanosaur at that, I have this to show you:

15 "biggest" dinosaurs you've never heard of!

2011-11-06T16:05:00.000-08:00

Just got back from SVP, but before I post on what happened in Vegas, here's something dino-related I've been planning to put up for a while now.

Let's admit it. We all want to know which one was the biggest - which were the longest, tallest, heaviest. It doesn't matter whether we're talking about dinosaurs, mammoths, trilobites, or anything. Bigger is better, size is where the action is. It's why we have Guinness Books and pie-eating contests. It's why we have the Forbes 100 and the Fortune 500. It's why Dubai has practically bankrupted itself in a race to built the world's tallest building. It's why Hummer Limousines were invented. (Ok, so maybe that wasn't such a good idea...)

Everyone thinks they know the biggest dinosaur. But even for people who would never be caught dead thinking it was T. rex, or even "brontosaurus", the real answer is elusive. For dino buffs in the 90's it was Ultrasaurus - oops, I mean Ultrasauros - or perhaps Supersaurus or Seismosaurus. Then we thought we knew better, got rid of the name Ultrasauros altogether, and sometime in the late 90s the record holder became Argentinosaurus (though it was found in 1993). Now there are other giant sauropod dinosaurs like Puertasaurus that may be even bigger. And of course people are talking about the legendary lost giant diplodocid, Amphicoelias fragillimus, the possible hoax titanosaur Bruhathkayosaurus, as well as more bona-fide but almost equally mysterious titanosaurs like Argyrosaurus, Paralititan, and “Antarctosaurus”. Futalognkosaurus rears its headless neck as the most complete giant dinosaur to date, and probably topped 100 feet long – but estimating the size and shape of most of the others is a lot harder because they're only known from a few bones. Then we get word from Greg Paul that the biggest dinosaur isn't a titanosaur at all, but that the record may actually belong to a new Mamenchisaurus species of almost mythic proportions.

Well, paleo fans, I've got some shocking news for you. The biggest dinosaur may not be ANY of these. There are a LOT more contenders for "biggest dinosaur" than most people realize. And even the runners-up and 'regional champions' are pretty impressive though not very well known. Some of the biggest and most amazing giant dinosaurs may just be the ones you've never heard of. Here are just fifteen of them, in no particular order......

15. The Dry Mesa Brachiosaur – it's not “Ultrasauros” and apparently not B. altithorax either!

In 1985 Jim Jensen became famous for digging up not one but THREE huge sauropod dinosaurs, that between them seemed to steal the record of “biggest dinosaur” from the long-unchallenged king, Brachiosaurus (never mind that Argyrosaurus was bigger than Brachiosaurus, and was described ten years earlier in 1893!)

Working in Colorado's Dry Mesa Quarry, Jensen originally described Ultrasaurus and Supersaurus as brachiosaurs, and Dystylosaurus as a possible brachiosaur. He'd actually caused hundreds of tons of confusion. Supersaurus turned out to be a diplodocid, Ultrasaurus was a chimera of a brachiosaur shoulder blade and a diplodocid neck vertebra, which turned out to be from Supersaurus, and Dystylosaurus also turned out to be a Supersaurus! What's more, Ultrasaurus had to be renamed Ultrasauros, because some genius in Korea had already claimed the name - for a wimpy animal that was way smaller than Brachiosaurus, and therefore didn't even deserve to have the word "Ultra" anywhere near its name - and worst of all, this Korean "Ultrasaurus" was so fragmentary that it wasn't even identifiable as a valid genus!

Jensen (over 6 ft. tall) in his famous pose with a Supersaurus shoulder blade (left)

and a far rarer pic with his even larger referred "Ultrasauros" shoulder blade (right)

And since the type material for Jensen's Ultrasauros was really the mistaken Supersaurus neck bone, rather than the brachiosaur shoulder blade, Ultrasauros was sunk into Supersaurus, and the shoulder blade was now an orphan specimen with no name.

But this shoulder blade, a monster at 9 feet long, is actually the bone that had actually made "Ultrasauros" so famous even though it wasn't the official type specimen. So what was it?

Many paleontologists just concluded that it was a big Brachiosaurus altithorax. Greg Paul suggested as much, though he also referred to it as the "Delta Giant". But critical differences emerged - first of all, even though the fact that there was no complete shoulder material for Brachiosaurus altithorax prior to Jensen's discovery makes it a convenient classification, there is the lower part of a shoulder (the coracoid bone) known for B. altithorax, and it's shaped very differently from the coracoid on Jensen's brachiosaur.

Jensen (left) and an assistant with the 9-foot Dry Mesa shoulder blade,

a 9-foot rib (Brachiosaurus sp.) and the Potter Creek humerus,

which actually seems to be a legit Brachiosaurus altithorax.

In addition, the coracoid on Jensen's brachiosaur is fused to the scapula (which means it's an adult animal), whereas the only known B. altithorax coracoid is not fused to a scapula (which indicates it was probably a teenager). Yet the Jensen brachiosaur's coracoid is SMALLER than that of a teenage B. altithorax. So this animal, as an adult, looks to be smaller than B. altithorax (or at least had a slimmer chest - we don't know if B. altithorax had 9-foot long shoulder blades, or how big it could get). One thing's for certain - the Dry Mesa brachiosaur has very different proportions from either Brachiosaurus or Giraffatitan. Dr. Mike Taylor (2009) pointed out that this animal was probably a different genus altogether. It must have had a very deep but narrow rib cage/chest region relative to other brachiosaurs - but it is noticeably a brachiosaur.

Though it's almost certainly not as massive as an adult Brachiosaurus or Giraffatitan, there's no easy way to tell if Jensen's adult animal was bigger or smaller than the teenage holotype of B. altithorax - it was probably slimmer and therefore lighter, but the crazy-long scapula indicates some extreme proportions, possibly greater torso depth and a larger neck which may make up for its lighter, slimmer body. Euhelopus shows a similar gigantism in the shoulder - and its neck is simply astounding. Indeed, big shoulders in macronarians generally indicate both tall shoulder neural spines ("withers") and very long necks. So perhaps the Dry Mesa Giant may have had an unusually long neck even by brachiosaur standards, and thus been longer than Brachiosaurus. Perhaps even a hundred-footer. But a slim one, for a brachiosaur. And who knows - this adult may not be a very old adult. Older ones could perhaps be considerably larger. Either way, this thing absolutely dwarfs Jensen, and Jensen was a tall man.

There are many other large brachiosaur bones found by Jensen across Utah that may belong to this unnamed genus, including anterior cervical and posterior dorsal vertebrae, hips, and a pretty big upper femur section. At present they are housed in the BYU collection and labeled as "Brachiosaurus sp.", though none of them look like Brachiosaurus altithorax and a few are downright bizarre.

14. The Plagne trackmaker - don't mess with France!

In 2009 there were some huge sauropod tracks discovered in Plagne, France, which measured 1.5m wide. that's downright colossal. In fact it was such big news that SV-POW did a major story on it. By comparison, the feet of the Berlin Giraffatitan HMN SII are only about 70cm wide. So we're talking about an animal that had feet TWICE as big. That's up in near-mythical Amphicoelias fragillimus territory!

the Plagne tracks

If there's a lesson here I think it's pretty obvious - you don't have to look in Colorado or even North America to find evidence of dinosaurs that reached truly shocking sizes. Of course there's another lesson too - don't mess with France!

13. The Broome Sandstone trackmaker - the REAL thunder from Down Under!

Matt Wedel of SV-POW also noted that Tony Thulborn discovered some tracks in the Broome Sandstone of Australia back in 1994 - where the pes prints were also 1.5m wide. Gigantic. Like, Amphicoelias fragillimus gigantic. These are legit prints and they really ARE that big, according to a very passionate Thulborn. And they aren't the only ones.

12. Breviparopus - King of the brachiosaurs?

Breviparopus (Dutuit and Ouazzou, 1980) is known from a trackway on a mountain slope in Morocco, that is made up of tracks 90cm wide. Not as large as the Plagne or Broome tracks, but still substantially larger than Giraffatitan. And these tracks are heavily collapsed and were made in loose mud, as is evident from the nearly caved-in toe claw prints - the feet in reality were more like 1.15m wide, which would result in a creature 130 feet long assuming it was a brachiosaur with proportions similar to Giraffatitan. And it does seem to be a brachiosaur, given that it's a narrow-gauge trackway in a cretaceous deposit, with a small thumb claw print (most other sauropod groups had a much bigger thumb claw, which was actually carried off the ground on a short metacarpal and thus didn't make prints).

Part of the trackway of Breviparopus taghbaloutensis (from Ishigaki, 1989)

Note the very thin, nearly collapsed toe claw prints, and the small

thumb claw impression on the first left manus print. The irregular shape of the last

pes print (at right) is an additional clue of the extreme looseness of the mud.

Though the Plagne and Broome tracks make it clear that Breviparopus wasn't the biggest dinosaur by a long shot (contrary to what the Guinness Book claims with its imaginary 157-foot estimate), it was still downright huge and possibly the biggest brachiosaur known today. Sauroposeidon was around 110 ft. long (the same approximate length as Argentinosaurus) so a 130-foot Breviparopus is still among the biggest dinosaurs in terms of raw length and height. Keep in mind though, that being longer than Argentinosaurus does NOT make you heavier. Brachiosaurs generally were much lighter than titanosaurs of the same length (but much heavier than diplodocids of the same length). Incidentally these tracks are incorrectly dated in some internet sources as being mid-Jurassic in age, based on some rather spotty research. They were actually Early Cretaceous, from the Barremian epoch.

Last March of the Breviparopus.
The first hi-fi restoration of this dinosaur in history. And it's mine.

11. Ultrasauripus - so maybe there were truly gigantic sauropods in Korea after all...

Ultrasauripus ungulatus is a set of prints found in Korea's Uiseong Jeo-ri formation, which according to Rexisto, may be brachiosaurid. So far it has not been associated with any particular genus, but the pes prints are 1.15m wide, which is comparable to Breviparopus. There are rumors of even larger brachiosaur prints in Gara Samani, Algeria, but so far information on these has been very scarce.

10. Parabrontopodus - more proof of Amphicoelias fragillimus at last?

Perhaps the biggest of the sauropod footprint taxa, Parabrontopodus distercii (Meijide-Fuentes et al.,1999) is known from gigantic prints as wide as 1.65m, found in the Spanish town of Soria (though the majority of the prints are about 1.48m wide, perhaps due to being partially collapsed and heavily eroded). It's a good deal larger than Parabrontopodus macintoshi (Lockley, 1994) and is probably from an unrelated animal. No less than six other sets of tracks have been referred somewhat dubiously to Parabrontopodus, from regions as far apart as Switzerland and Chile. Most seem to be from unrelated animals - some diplodocids, some brachiosaurs, and some titanosaurs. If the Spanish Parabrontopodus tracks are from a diplodocid, they could belong to something as large as Amphicoelias fragillimus. If they are from a brachiosaur, it would be the biggest brachiosaur yet known, edging out Breviparopus by a huge margin.

9. “~~Shinhesaurus~~” - oops, I mean Xinghesaurus - the mysterious Tokyo titanosaur they won't tell you about...

In Tokyo recently there was a new exhibition at a gigantic museum hall, which resembled a massive aircraft hangar. In this there was a huge mounted skeleton of Mamenchisaurus sinocanadorum, the new mamenchisaur which reached 116 ft. long and is claimed by Greg Paul to be the largest dinosaur in terms of mass as well. I don't know about the mass, but it is certainly impressive.

But what's stranger is that along with this mega-mamenchisaur (and the shameless Klamelisaurus whose head intrudes into the foreground), there are two other sauropods in that hall - both titanosaurs. Take a closer look here:

In the background, far behind the huge mamenchisaur and the meat-eater (probably a Sinraptor), there's a low wall - behind this wall you can see a light cream colored Huabeisaurus skeleton rearing its head up (it's roughly 75 feet long), and a bit closer, there's a longer, darker skeleton mounted with a more horizontal neck. Don't be fooled, that dark skeleton is no Diplodocus. It is in fact a titanosaur (probably a nemegtosaurid) that looks a lot like the Huabeisaurus. It's not mentioned by name anywhere in any book or on the internet, except here, if you can read Japanese.

The name is written in katakana letters, which are used for writing foreign words - they are phonetic, not pictographic characters like the Kanji. They read "Shinhesaurus". And this is a name I've never come across before. It appears nowhere in the paleo-literature. But actually I have it on good authority that this is a garbled transliteration into Japanese from the original Chinese name: Xinghesaurus. Now that name is mentioned in a few places on the internet, but it's an animal that has never been formally described. The skeleton looks remarkably like Huabeisaurus, (not surprising, since both are heavily reconstructed, and probably by the same folks). It may even be just a larger individual of Huabeisaurus. But interestingly, unlike Huabeisaurus, the skull on Xinghesaurus appears to be authentic (or at least a cast of a distorted original). Compare the two:

Huabeisaurus

Xinghesaurus

...both from the same exhibit hall. Notice the picture of a man holding the

Xinghesaurus skull. For some reason the skull on the mounted skeleton looks

a bit slack-jawed. Perhaps the upper jaw was casted too long...

All the same this is a very interesting discovery. The huge hips with their deep ilia are probably the most interesting feature - and one it shares with Huabeisaurus. It's a pity there's no more information on this beast. All I can tell is that it's longer than Huabeisaurus, and that both animals are mostly neck and tail. Still, though they don't have the biggest bodies in the titanosauria, they are nevertheless the biggest Asian nemegtosaurs known from postcranial remains. There's not exactly much for them to compete against in their family - Rapetosaurus is the only other bona-fide nemegtosaur known from anything other than a skull, and it's tiny by comparison even as an adult (as is Opisthocoelicaudia, which may or may not be a nemegtosaur depending on how you see it - no skull for that one so it's hard to tell). Nevertheless Huabeisaurus was so far the biggest Asian sauropod of the Campanian, so with Xinghesaurus being even bigger, that should be worth something.... it looks to be around 90 ft. long. The tail seems nearly as long as the neck.

Anyway there you have it. Xinghesaurus, so far the biggest of the later Asian titanosaurs and the biggest nemegtosaur in the eastern hemisphere. At least it seems to be a nemegtosaur. And at least one Japanese blog calls it Xinghesaurus (or "Shinhesaurus"). Aside from that, there's no mention of it. Not a paper, not a single raw measurement, not even a brief mention in a fossil survey. I still would like to think there's a far bigger nemegtosaur still out there in Late Cretaceous Asia waiting to be found, something like the Antarctosaurus giganteus of the Gobi Desert. for now, though, we'll have to content ourselves with this (marginally) big brother of Huabeisaurus, which the paleo community so far has seemed to ignore completely. What a shame.... Xinghesaurus, we barely even knew you.

8. The infamous Lonely Planet Nemegtosaur sacrum – the land of Genghis Khan holds more secrets than just his burial place!

One of the least talked-about new sauropods is this creature, known only from a sacrum so pale white that it looks like fresh bone, as if the animal died a week ago. Its exact size is hard to gauge, but it seems to be at least big for a nemegtosaur.

Everyone who's every traveled to another country is probably familiar with the Lonely Planet travel guides, most of which are top-notch for both the novice traveler and the National Geographic veteran. But the publisher also has a website full of stock photos of random things they found in each country. In their section on Mongolia, this interesting pic turned up.

Nemegtosaur sacrum and right ilium at dinosaur canyon,

Nemegt Uul, Omnogov, Mongolia

That water bottle looks a bit on the large side for the hand-held variety - perhaps close to a foot long. Out in the Gobi desert, you'd better be packing some big water. The pelvis looks then like it would be around 6 feet wide or more with both ilia intact. Sounds big, but remember we're dealing with titanosaurs here - insanely wide for their length. Futalognkosaurus has a pelvis that's nearly 9 feet wide. And though a real giant in its own right, it's not the biggest dinosaur. All the same, the Nemegt Uul pelvis is pretty big by average saltasaur and nemegtosaur standards (there aren't that many nemegtosaurs known anyway, and even fewer big ones), but in any case this probably isn't the biggest they got. Though the bones look completely fused, the sacral ribs look very light and not as massively reinforced as in fully mature individuals - it's probably not a very old animal, and may not even be an adult. Just by virtue of being a titanosaur, this is one of the biggest animals ever to live in Mongolia. If it had the elongated proportions of Rapetosaurus or "Shinhesaurus", it could have easily topped 80 ft. Giraffatitan had a pelvis nearly 2m wide as well. That of Saltasaurus is 1.15m. Interpret that as you will.

Only two questions remain - 1) will anyone write a paper on this pelvis? and 2) does anyone actually know about it apart from Lonely Planet?

7. Cooper and George – when will they describe these things already?!?!?

Australia has produced several major titanosaur finds. The problem is that instead of proper scientific descriptions, most of them are still stuck with silly personal nicknames. Elliot, Mary, Cooper, and George. Cooper and George are to two largest, apparently. Australian media sources claim these are both colossal dinosaurs, nearly as big as Argentinosaurus. But in other places far more modest estimates are given. Here's one explanation:

"Subsequent excavations by Queensland Museum staff have so far discovered the remains of two giant titanosauriform dinosaurs. A 1.5 metre (5 foot) humerus weighing 100 kg has been nicknamed 'Cooper'. A second giant bone, a femur 1.8 metres (6 feet) long (from another animal) has been called 'George'. The larger animal (George) has been estimated to have been around 25 metres (82 feet) in length, making it potentially the largest dinosaur ever discovered in Australia, and among the largest sauropods in the world. These two animals lived about 2 to 5 million years later than Elliot from further north, who has been estimated to have been 'only' about 18 metres (60 feet) in length."

Ok so it's not quite big enough to rival Argentinosaurus. Actually, not even close. The humerus of George is in the Paralititan/Argyrosaurus range, so it's no doubt pretty big, but certainly not the biggest. And actually, the funny thing is, they even look a bit like the humeri of Paralititan and Argyrosaurus: very wide, rectangular, and flat like a surfboard.

A flat humerus from one of the two mysterious giant titanosaurs

of Australia (no solid info on whether it's Cooper or George).

Another such flat humerus (again not sure if it's Cooper or George,

but it has the same life illustration as the last humerus).

It's almost uniformly wide across its whole length like some kind of Cretaceous snowboard -

a very rare configuration in titanosaurs, and all other sauropods for that matter.

Paralititan stromeri humerus from Egypt (very flat), with Jason "Chewie" Poole

of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences showing journalists how to surf the Cretaceous Egyptian tides.

Argyrosaurus superbus holotype forelimb (from Lydekker, 1893) .

Notice the same type of extremely wide, flattened "snowboard" humerus

Most titanosaur humeri are far narrower in the middle than those of argyrosaurids (even if they may be pretty wide at the ends). Other titanosaurs also tend to have relatively more cylindrical humerus shafts (which is the standard condition in most sauropods), rather than the extremely flat shafts of argyrosaurs.

Unfortunately, also like both Argyrosaurus and Paralititan, Cooper and George seem far too incomplete to deduce their size with certainty. Of course some published photos with scale bars aren't too much to ask for... are they?

And the length estimate of 82 feet for George, already nothing too earth-shattering, may not even be reliable, since we don't know how much of the skeleton is known, to make such estimates! And it all depends on what kind of dinosaurs Cooper and George really are. A six-foot femur on a brachiosaur or early titanosauriform doesn't result in anything close to Argentinosaurus size. The 75-foot long Giraffatitan in Berlin has humeri that are SEVEN feet long, and it only comes out to around 35 tons (as opposed to the 85 tons usually estimated for Argentinosaurus). Some femur material would definitely help even out the odds, but the problem is that there seems to be no progress whatsoever on these dinosaurs since 2005. The fossils of 'Cooper' and 'George' have since been put on display at the Queensland Museum in Brisbane, but there is still no formal description. One can only guess that the fossils are too incomplete to be diagnostic, or that there are still excavations of the same animals going on at the original dig sites.

No word yet on which is true, or neither. The Queensland museum seems to still have its hands tied with two earlier sauropod discoveries, "Elliot" and "Mary", so it's anyone's guess when somebody will finally get the nerve to write a paper on Cooper and George. Heck, if I had access to the fossils and could do a good analysis on whether there were truly argyrosaurs in Australia, I'd be the toast of SVP! You'd think Aussie paleontologists would be all over this one, but some of them have told me that the Queenslanders are a breed apart from the rest, hoarding yet taking far longer than normal to describe their finds. I don't know, but it does sound too fishy for television. Too bad the other provinces don't have such giants popping out of the ground waiting for a real name.

6. The French monster titanosaur – the biggest, baddest ass-kicking femur north of the Mediterranean!

It's not often that a new dinosaur species gets dug up which really shakes the world of science. Paleontology, maybe. But consider shaking up ALL of science. Finding something so unbelievable, that imagine the feeling you get if at first glance the average person would think you were some kook peddling the National Enquirer, before you showed them all your un-edited, high-definition full color photos of YOU next to your near-mythical find and watched their jaws drop clear through the Mantle.

Yeah. That feeling. The rush of adrenaline that makes you forget all about Tiktaalik, Ida the Adapid and all the other overhyped (and worse yet, SMALL) fossil finds that the media fawns over (and misrepresents... LOL)

Well I can only guess what the guy who discovered this behemoth felt like when his heart skipped a few:

Get ready to choke on your freedom fries! This colossal femur belongs to an Early Cretaceous titanosaur dug up in southern France in November 2010. Yeah, not that long ago.

And just how big is it? At least 2.2m long, according to Science Daily. That's 7.3 feet, but that measurement was taken before the whole bone was excavated, looks like it could be even bigger than that. It's currently the biggest femur of any animal ever found in all of Europe, easily beating the primitive sauropod Turiasaurus, whose femur is 1.9m. The monster French titanosaur is probably well into the 100-foot range, if you assume it had proportions like most members of titanosauria (most of them had much longer necks than Saltasaurus - perhaps unless you're Ken Carpenter, that is...). And the extreme slenderness of this bone, relative to its length, could mean that this individual wasn't even close to the maximum adult size possible for its species! It rivals the femurs of "Antarctosaurus" giganteus in size, and even looks similar at the bottom end. Though I don't discount the possibility that this slender and mostly straight femur could also be lognkosaurian.

Whatever kind of titanosaur it's from, this bone alone could easily put a few Renaults out of order, that's for sure. I don't even think most dinosaurs could survive being hit by the foot of something that big! And there seems to be the end of another bone (perhaps a femur) sticking out of the rock to the left of the pit. This site, close to the town of Angeac-Charente in France's Champagne region, is definitely yielding a lot of remains, and I'm looking forward to what else comes out of there. Nearly 400 bones from many other dinosaurs were found jammed into a relatively small area at the site, including some theropod remains (probably little squat abelisaurs, but who knows so far...). A report of what was found at the site is available HERE. (You have to know French though... to get its true meaning... all you babel fish cheaters...)

I have it on good authority that remains of an even BIGGER titanosaur were found at the site and are still undergoing preparation. The photo below shows what may be the bottom end of that beast's femur at left - judging by the height of most of the guys in this picture, the complete bone was easily 8 feet long. On the other hand, the condyles at the bottom of that shaft look a bit more like a tibia than a femur - which could mean a colossal 5-foot long tibia and a femur probably in excess of 8 feet:

Finally, Monsieur Professor, the mystery of who made the Plagne tracks looks close to being solved!

Move over, Ampelosaurus. These new Champagne titans are putting France firmly on the map of towering, scale-busting sauropods that could kick some serious carnosaur ass. Which may be why all the really big nasty Early Cretaceous predators stayed the hell out of France altogether (at least it appears so, though we don't know that for certain).

As we've seen before - don't mess with France!

5. “Brachiosaurus” nougaredi – hips don't lie!

One of the most obscure giant brachiosaurs (but because of its obscurity, also among the most fascinating) was discovered in Algeria in 1960. Dr. Albert-Felix de Lapparent was excavating dinosaur remains in an Early Cretaceous formation in Algeria known as the "Continental Intercalaire" and brought them back to Paris. The material in one site known as "Wargla" included a huge sacrum and some left metacarpals and phalanges. In addition, scattered across hundreds of meters at the site were partial bones of the left forearm, wrist bones, a right shin bone, and fragments that may have come from metatarsals. This second set of remains, for reasons that are not fully understood, were never excavated and have probably since eroded away. Lapparent writes in his 1960 paper:

"Several hundred meters east of the sacrum lay the bones of the left forelimb (Pl. III, fig. 3), which were collected with care by Mr. Gillmann; they were accompanied by rather abundant fossil wood. In the locality, the distal ends of the large ulna and radius were observed, and a carpal bone; these very fragile elements could not be recovered."

They were too fragile to be recovered? Well perhaps he didn't have the best fossil glue on hand. Something like this wouldn't simply be abandoned today!

However, it may matter little, since most paleontologists believe that none of these remains, or even the recovered metacarpals, could possibly from the same animal as the sacrum - they just aren't anywhere near big enough.

Known as "specimen ZR.2", the sacrum was the real prize in this expedition. It was gigantic by the standards of anything known at the time, including Brachiosaurus and Giraffatitan. Lapparent commented:

"A large sacrum initially drew attention, lying flat on the reg (Pl. II, fig.3-4). This beautiful element must have been complete during its burial in the sediment, not far from large trunks of silicified trees. The dorsal part was exposed by the erosion that delivered the piece today, and several transverse processes were altered. Such as could be removed and reconstructed, this sauropod sacrum presents an exceptional size: total length = 130 cm; diameter = 80 cm. The sacral vertebrae number four, fused together. The first offers an enormous anterior disc, 23 cm wide and 22 cm tall. The third sacral is 28 cm long and has a disc diameter of 20 cm; the keel is very marked on the ventral part, and the diameter of the centrum in the middle is only 10 cm. The zygapophyses have wide and strongly twisted stalks; they are extended up to 40 cm to the right and left of the neural canal; at their end, they are widened in the shape of a powerful club and are solidly fused together there. In spite of its weight, we were able to bring this element back to Paris."

This massive sacrum, which was largely eroded on top and was missing the first sacral vertebra (it originally would have had five, not four), became known as "Brachiosaurus nougaredi". The metacarpals and other limb elements found at the site were also included in this species, though they likely don't belong there, and not from the same individual. While the appearance and description of the sacrum certainly give away a brachiosaurid identity, it can not possibly be a species of Brachiosaurus itself. It was from the Early Cretaceous (Albian epoch) in Algeria. But Brachiosaurus lived in North America in the Late Jurassic (Kimmeridgian-Tithonian epochs) and disappears from the fossil record at the end of this period, a full 45 million years before the Algerian brachiosaur "ZR.2" existed! No genus in the history of dinosauria has survived that long. And the shape of the sacral ribs is different from both Brachiosaurus and Giraffatitan (but between the two, it appears to be more like Giraffatitan). Nevertheless, whatever "ZR.2" or "Brachiosaurus" nougaredi is, it's certainly a brachiosaur of some sort, and it's bigger than anything else in Cretaceous Africa aside from Paralititan.

Even though "Brachiosaurus" nougaredi is only known from a sacrum, it could have easily rivaled or even exceeded Sauroposeidon in size. Though the total length of what was left of the sacrum is 130cm, when fully complete with all five vertebrae it would have been more like 160cm long - a full 60% larger than the sacrum of the Berlin Giraffatitan! Now if you assume it had similar proportions to Giraffatitan, scaling up from the 75-foot Berlin specimen by an additional 60% yields a brachiosaur 120 feet (36m) long - truly colossal, and perhaps even larger than Sauroposeidon. Of course, that's assuming it had similar proportions to Giraffatitan. If it was built more like Sauroposeidon, with an even more elongated neck, then it could have topped 130 feet (40m), no problem. As big as Breviparopus, though it is younger in age.

You might think that this dinosaur should be super-famous today, considering its size, the fact that it was discovered way back in 1960, and the simple fact that brachiosaurs are just badass to begin with.

Well, don't we wish! This dinosaur is so obscure that it apparently hasn't been published in a single book, and I practically had to write the Wikipedia article on it! And it's not like a sacrum is insufficient material - it's still complete enough to be diagnostic, enough to tell that it's a unique genus of brachiosaur - and there have been far more famous dinosaurs that got tons more publicity on the basis of equally scant or even far worse material! Troodon was originally described based on a single tooth, as was the dubious duckbill "Trachodon" which graced dinosaur books for nearly half a century. The original material for Oviraptor was pretty bad, even the skull was reconstructed wrong, while the type material for Cetiosaurus is so badly eroded and unidentifiable that it ended up being discarded and another specimen was designated as the type! And lets not forget Bruhathkayosaurus, which received tons of media hype as the "biggest dinosaur" up through the 90's but no photograph has ever been published, the authors initially mistook it for a theropod for over a decade, the remains themselves were not excavated and are now rumored to have been lost in a monsoon flood, and the only known images are a few cartoonish drawings that may as well have been the work of a 5-year-old child!

Considering how shoddy and borderline crypto some of these cases are, "Brachiosaurus" nougaredi is actually a pretty solid, legit dinosaur! Its name should be on every Jurassic Park fanboy's lips! But it isn't. And it may just be because this giant was not only incorrectly named, but also badly publicized.

It was mentioned among many other fragmentary Algerian dinosaurs in a survey paper by Lapparent in 1960, and there hasn't been a single paper focusing on it since. Even Lapparent himself seems to have abandoned it. The specimen itself is supposedly in Paris, but so far I haven't been able to find out what museum it's being kept in, or if, like so many other sadly underrated giant dinosaurs, the "scientists" responsible for protecting this find simply got careless and lost it. It SUCKS when important fossils just languish in a vault for decades and nobody studies them. It sucks even more when they get lost or destroyed as a result of ignorance or carelessness. But at least we have a detailed description AND some corroborating photographic evidence to prove that this one was real, regardless of what has become of the actual sacrum since then. That's right, Shakira - the hips don't lie.

4. Lacovara's titanosaur – the biggest AND most complete of the giants?

This giant is brand new and doesn't even have a name yet. It's not even clear what it looked like, but we do know a few things - it's a titanosaur, it's from Argentina, and according to Dr. Ken Lacovara of Drexel University who led the dig, it's more complete than any titanosaur found before (yes, including Futalognkosaurus). And..... it's huge.

I had to honor of meeting Dr. Lacovara in person at the SVP 2010 convention in Pittsburgh (and again this last time around in Vegas), where he explained a bit more about this massive beast. Some of it was being prepared in the fossil lab at the Carnegie Museum (where I snapped some pictures of the bones), and the rest (actually most of it) was being prepared in the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences. The idea being that two teams can get the process done a lot faster than one, and believe me, this is one huge dinosaur - as complete as it is, it will take a long time to unpack and prepare it. Dr. Lacovara said it was similar in size to Paralititan, possibly even bigger. Assuming Paralititan was about 90 ft. long and 70 tons, that makes this new giant a serious contender for the title of "biggest dinosaur".

The femur of this beast was 2.2m long, the same length as the French monster's femur, and its hips are as big as a forklift pallet!

That's one ilium. Okay, so it's even longer than a forklift pallet. Scary.

The bones were cracked into many fragments, but most were pieced together with putty.

These appear to be either the ischia or the pubes. I'd say ischia due to their shortness, as titanosaur pubes tended to be much larger than the ischia, in order to support a huge belly.

Some rib fragments. The toy Diplodocus is there simply for scale, or someone was having too much fun :) This thing was not related to Diplodocus.

A sternal plate. Two of these bones strengthened the chest, and they were particularly large in titanosaurs.

These are probably the pubes. They are larger and more massive than the ischia. They're still rather compact and not very elongated compared to the pubes of some other titanosaurs, a trait which immediately brings to mind the pubis of Argyrosaurus...

The thick, stubby pubis of Argyrosaurus (superbus?) subadult specimen (PVL 4628).

Modified from Powell, 2003.

Lacovara's titanosaur is indeed a huge dinosaur, but is it the biggest? Judging by femur length, I'd have to be cautious. The femur of Argentinosaurus, though not totally complete, is estimated at 2.5m in length. So even with its 2.2m femur, Lacovara's titanosaur may not be as big as Argentinosaurus. But there's one big caveat - even similar dinosaurs can have different limb proportions. Argentinosaurus and Lavocara's titanosaur may not be very closely related, and there's always the possibility that the new animal is wider or longer than Argentinosaurus despite having shorter legs. If the pubes are any indication, it may be more similar to Argyrosaurus, which is a later and more advanced titanosaur - or perhaps it's closer to something else entirely. And argyrosaurids in all likelihood have different proportions than Argentinosaurus. Furthermore there's always the possibility that the new titanosaur isn't fully grown - which would be the case if it turns out its shoulder blades haven't undergone complete fusion. I haven't seen them, and for all we know they may not even be unpacked yet, so the jury's still out on that one.

All the same, I would be surprised if this particular individual didn't reach at least 100 feet and 75 tons.
Was it bigger than Argentinosaurus? We may well find out soon.

3. Huanghetitan – that's right, I mean the big one. No, the REALLY big one.

Our next giant comes from China. And no, it's not a mamenchisaur. You should know better by now ;)

The number of new titanosaurs coming of of China is nothing short of astounding. One of the most productive regions is Gansu, in the north of the country, a hotbed of Early Cretaceous fossils. The biggest dinosaur in the area, Huanghetitan liujiaxiaensis, was described by You et al. in 2006. Named for the Huang He (yellow river) which flows through Beijing, it is known from fragmentary materials including two caudal vertebrae, an almost complete sacrum, rib fragments, and the left shoulder girdle.

Huanghetitan liujiaxiaensis scapula and coracoid, unfused. This individual, though huge, was not fully grown.

Huanghetitan liujiaxiaensis sacrum

It was discovered in the eastern part of the Lanzhou Basin (Hekou group) in the Gansu Province in 2004. Rapidly, a speculative skeleton was cast and sculpted and put on display in a museum built pretty much on top of the actual Lanzhou fossil site (which also has the rare distinction of being one of the few fossil sites in the world to preserve both bones and footprints) But this was only the beginning.

I don't know where they got those weird neck vertebrae from, since they aren't part of the actual type specimen, but I'm guessing they recasted and spliced parts of Euhelopus and Huabeisaurus together to get the desired (and somewhat grotesque) effect...

At least the head looks believable - though the lower arms don't.

Huanghetitan liujiaxiaensis was probably around 80 feet long, and was indeed a massive beast to say the least. But it was still no record-breaker.

The world was soon to see something far more impressve come out of Early Cretaceous China - a second, much larger species was found further south in the Mangchuan formation of Ruyang county, Henan province. Huanghetitan ruyangensis was described in 2007 based on a partial spinal column and several ribs, some of which were nearly 3m (10 feet) long.

These are the longest ribs known for any dinosaur, and immediately a speculative skeleton was sculpted and unveiled at Ruyang, and the headlines of Xinhua news boomed with news that Huanghetitan ruyangensis had "the deepest body cavity of any known dinosaur".

You have to give the people that planned this display credit, they sure know how to make an attractive presentation. Those cervical ribs look way too thick and stubby though... just as with the type species mount in Lanzhou, this display's neck is 100% imagination.

Actually, this may not be correct. Other massive sauropods should have possibly deeper body cavities and rib cages, their ribs just weren't recovered! A good example might be Puertasaurus or Paralititan. There's one rib known from Argyrosaurus, but it's an immature specimen and the rib isn't complete. Overall, most titanosaur specimens don't include complete ribs - that's what makes the huge ribs of Huanghetitan ruyangensis truly special. We actually have a good idea how big its rib cage was!

As big as it is, though, I would have expected them to size up the fake neck and tail to match, but they both look far too small and short. Especially the neck - WAY too short. This thing looks like a cetiosaur or a camarasaur, not a basal titanosaur. Basal titanosaurs had enormous necks, not unlike that of Brachiosaurus or Euhelopus in general proportions. And the fake ilium just doesn't look right.... a bit too horizontal and flat-topped for a typical titanosaur (but very typical if it were a mamenchisaur...)

Indeed, it may not quite be a titanosaur, but a slightly more primitive "titanosauriform" - more basal than Andesaurus, but more derived than Euhelopus. It's got enough unique features to erect its own family, Huanghetitanidae. Which, for now, is limited to China (much as a hypothetical "Venenosauridae" would be to North America, or Chubutisauridae to South America). In any case, it's a giant among giants, and if the neck and tail are ever found, they will probably a lot longer than what you see here - the whole animal was probably 100 feet long or more, and could have even rivaled Argentinosaurus in mass. Though the type species of Huanghetitan, while large, is no record setter, there's no doubt that the second species, Huanghetitan ruyangensis - that's right, the really big one - is a serious contender for the biggest dinosaur.

2. Daxiatitan – "other dinosaur have necks. I have a skyscraper."

If Huanghetitan ruyangensis takes the cake for the deepest body cavity, there's one other dinosaur discovered the very next year in China that had one of the longest necks ever found (I know that's a pretty big club to join, but this new dinosaur isn't kidding around when it comes to necks).

Daxiatitan binglingi, a giant relative of Euhelopus, was found in 2008 in the Lanzhou basin formation (Hekou group) - the same formation that produced Huanghetitan liujiaxiaensis (the smaller of the two Huanghetitan species). It probably didn't come into contact with the colossal H. ruyangensis, which lived in a different fauna many miles further south (and probably at a different time as well).

Daxiatitan, unlike Huanghetitan, is known from fairly complete remains by giant titanosauriform standards. Nearly the entire neck is known, as well as most of the dorsal vertebrae, the shoulder blade, and the femur. So it's a simpler matter to reconstruct the skeleton - more molding and casting, less speculative sculpting.

Daxiatitan dorsal vertebrae, with neural spines partially restored, sitting in their molds.

Yes, the shoulder blade is actually big enough to "do the Jensen" next to.

Shoulder blade and femur. Scale bar = 10 cm

Notice that the femur has a very large, clean fault fracture -

an effect of fossilization that strangely did not crush or shatter the bone.

The dorsal column is almost identical to that of Euhelopus. Not only that, the femur has the same outward tilt to the condyles at the knee joint. Which can only mean one thing - both of these "Euhelopodids" walked with their shins and feet rotated out like Charlie Chaplin! The two animals are certainly closely related, though the shoulder blades and femurs are still different enough that it's evident they were not the exact same animal. The type (and only) specimen of Euhelopus, by the way, is not fully mature:

Euhelopus zdanskyi type skeletal by Greg Paul. Included for educational purposes only.

Note that the scapula and coracoid are unfused and therefore it's not yet an adult.

At roughly 50 feet long (assuming a short brachiosaur-like tail), it still looks cuddly. But just barely.

But before Jack Horner's followers jump to their typical conclusions (on the other hand, I don't know if he's ever touched a sauropod ...) let me say here that I highly doubt Daxiatitan could ever be the adult form of Euhelopus. Aside from the differences in the shoulder and femur (and probably some finer details of the vertebrae), it's also just way too big. The Euhelopus holotype, around 50 feet long, is not fully grown, but it's a teenager, NOT a child. Its vertebrae are fully formed and don't have any of the lateral sutures present in juvenile sauropods, so it didn't have that much more growing to do. So an adult Euhelopus might be 60-70 feet long, max. It would not be pushing 100 feet like Daxiatitan.

But since it had similar crazy neck proportions, the best way of getting an idea of the size of Daxiatitan is to take Euhelopus and scale it up. Since the tails of both animals are not known (Euhelopus is missing the entire tail, and only two tail vertebrae and a chevron from Daxiatitan were found), the length estimate is still a bit murky, but even with a short tail, Daxiatitan is about twice as big - easily a hundred-footer. And it could have been incredibly tall too, possibly topping 60 feet in height.

And it's got the biggest neck of just about any animal in the Early Cretaceous (apart from Sauroposeidon). Probably an even longer than Erketu. Erketu, let's remember, is a much smaller animal, and even though it has a proportionally crazier super-neck, Erketu's neck was still probably shorter than Daxiatitan's in terms of raw length. What's even better is that the neck of Daxiatitan is far more complete than anything we've got for either Sauroposeidon or Erketu.

So there you have it - the biggest, baddest neck in the Early Cretaceous Far East. Daxiatitan may not be busting any weight records with its compact Euhelopus-like torso, but it's still downright huge, and far and away the most complete and impressive giant sauropod specimen in the entire Early Cretaceous anywhere on the planet. Shocking, then, that it's virtually unknown to most dino-fans.

1. Ruyangosaurus giganteus – the largest – and strangest – of China's record breakers

Just when you thought Huanghetitan and Daxiatitan were big, China had one more titanosaur secret to body-slam everything you thought you knew about the biggest dinosaurs. This new titan isn't just huge beyond belief - it's also incredibly weird, even by the freaky standards of titanosauria, a superfamily which probably holds the unchallenged record for producing truly odd dinosaurs over the years. And seems to have its closest links with another species that was found thousands of miles away, across an entire ocean!

Discovered in 2009, this dinosaur seemed to steal the crown of "Asia's biggest" from both Huanghetitan and Daxiatitan instantly. Well, everyone has their 15 minutes... or in the cases of Huanghetitan and Daxiatitan, a whole year. Discovered near Huanghetitan ruyangensis, this new giant was one of many strange titanosaur lineages that migrated into China - the authors of the paper (Lu, et. al. 2009) describe its date vaguely as "early Late Cretaceous" which probably means the Cenomanian epoch. The new dinosaur was named "Ruyangosaurus giganteus", and the specimen consists of a "posterior cervical vertebra" (more likely an anterior dorsal), a posterior dorsal vertebra, a right femur, a right tibia, a partial cervical rib, and a partial dorsal rib. That's it. Just six bones. But six very huge bones.

It's actually one of only two sauropods to actually bear the species name "giganteus". The other is Antarctosaurus giganteus (Von Huene, 1929), and just as with that creature, the name fits. A bit of a welcome change from the inane habit, common in Von Huene's day, of giving grandiose names to creatures that don't deserve them - such as giving names like "Gigantosaurus" and "Titanosaurus" to random sauropod bones that were not especially huge - or for that matter, the more recent blunder of naming those non-diagnostic Korean fragments "Ultrasaurus" when there was nothing "ultra" about them.

Femurs of various titanosaurs and titanosauriforms including Ruyangosaurus and Antarctosaurus - all to scale. All in posterior view, except where otherwise noted.

It's obvious that Ruyangosaurus is bloody big, even compared to everything else.

What's also astonishing is that Ruyangosaurus seems more than a match for Antarctosaurus giganteus in size. The right femur of A. giganteus is 222cm long (well over 7 feet), while the right femur of Ruyangosaurus, as reconstructed, measures roughly 235cm long (over 7.7 feet). While the bottom half of the Ruyangosaurus femur is largely missing, the reconstruction appears to incorporate some distal fragments. The paper estimates the femur length at "about 200cm" (2m) but this would make the femur far shorter than what the reconstruction shows. Either way, it's up there with Antarctosaurus giganteus, and there's another line of evidence that shows it may even rival Argentinosaurus in mass.

The anterior dorsal vertebra recovered from the site is huge - the centrum alone is nearly 50 cm wide, comparable to both Argentinosaurus and Puertasaurus. Indeed the vertebra looks very similar to that of Puertasaurus - squat with a fat centrum, a very small neural canal, a wide triangular neural spine, and very short from front to back.

Anterior dorsal vertebrae of Ruyangosaurus (with missing portions outlined) and Puertasaurus.

Modified from Lu, et. al. 2009, and Novas et. al. 2005, respectively. The Ruyangosaurus vertebra has been diagonally crushed and faulted.

The diapophyses (side process) on Ruyangosaurus are very deep and likely were also very long as in Puertasaurus. This would have helped support a massively wide rib cage.

The funny thing is that the Lu, et. al. claimed that Ruyangosaurus is a primitive "Andesaurid" titanosaur on the basis of its size (a pretty awful condition for classifying any dinosaur species) and supposedly having a hypantrum-hyposphene complex (basically an interlocking "tab and slot" mechanism on the vertebrae just above the level of the spinal cord). But upon closer examination, it doesn't appear to have one at all. The hole above the anterior dorsal's neural canal isn't a hypantrum slot - it's just a hole where bone material got broken and punched out during fossilization (notice that it lies on the intersection of a HUGE diagonal crack and a smaller vertical crack on the neural spine!) The entire thing looks far more like Puertasaurus than Andesaurus. And for reference, here's an Andesaurus vertebra:

Andesaurus posterior dorsal (modified from Salgado, 1997)

This looks nothing like the Ruyangosaurus anterior dorsal you've already seen, no matter which way you look at it. Now compare this to the posterior dorsal of Ruyangosaurus:

Andesaurus and Ruyangosaurus posterior dorsal vertebrae.

Modified from Salgado (1997), and Lu, et.al. (2009), respectively.

Hypantrum? What hypantrum? All I see is a thick V-shaped lamina of bone connecting the prezygapophyses. There's no gap between them, no hypantrum slot for a hyposphene to even fit into! And from behind and the side, there's no trace of a hyposphene - just another V-shaped lamina above a flat space with a few very shallow and thin "spider laminae" which are barely visible. And this lack of a hypantrum-hyposphene complex is something only found in more advanced titanosaurs, not "andesaurids".

Is this giant REALLY a primitive andesaurid? I don't believe it. You be the judge.

Regardless of its taxonomic affinities Ruyangosaurus was still undeniably huge. But just how huge?
The anterior dorsal vertebra is only about 10% smaller than that of Puertasaurus, so assuming it had similar proportions to Puertasaurus, and assuming Puertasaurus was 125ft. long (as per my own restoration...).....

When you scale it down by 10%, you get a hypothetical "Ruyangosaurus" that was about 112.5 feet long. That tops Argentinosaurus. And that's still assuming a pretty conservative tail length and neck proportions similar to what I calculated for Puertasaurus (the huge Ruyangosaurus cervical rib may indicate an even longer neck, and overall even a length of 120 feet is still pretty likely). Actually, I've assumed three times already, and so much assuming means a lot of possibilities for error. But it's a better guesswork model than I've seen from anyone else's restorations, so if Ruyangosaurus was similar to Puertasaurus in proportions, the error is cut to a minimum.

However, even if Ruyangosaurus was longer than Argentinosaurus, its legs were considerably shorter. The Ruyangosaurus tibia is far shorter than the femur, and even the femur is at best, 2.35m long. That of Argentinosaurus is a full 2.5m, over 8 feet. And the tibia of Argentinosaurus is considerably longer than that of Ruyangosaurus, so all in all, the body of Ruyangosaurus seems to have been no more than 5m tall at the hips, while Argentinosaurus reached around 6.3m at the hips. But a lower body and shorter legs to not necessarily make a smaller or lighter dinosaur. Ruyangosaurus seems to have the odd "double-wide" body shape of Puertasaurus rather than the slimmer deep "barrel" belly of Argentinosaurus. Which means that it could have been wider than Argentinosaurus, and just perhaps (depending on the torso length), more voluminous and massive. 80 tons or more for a 112 to 120-foot titanosaur is definitely possible. Even if this creature was a short squat tank compared to Argentinosaurus.

Either way, there's a good possibility Ruyangosaurus is either the second or third largest dinosaur known from currently existing remains. And the biggest creature to roam the Middle Kingdom, hands down.

There you go. 15 mysterious giants that owned any scene they stomped into. And you saw it here first, in the Paleo Kingdom. The next forgotten giant.... may be one that you find!

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Finally, an ACTUAL commercial Greg Paul ripoff.

2011-09-24T19:23:00.000-07:00

We've heard of them, we've wondered about them, we've so far been mostly unable to find them.... like Bigfoot it seems they just melt away into nothingness as soon as you seem to be onto their trail. But I have found hard PROOF at last that blatant for-profit plagiarism of Greg Paul's paleo-art does indeed exist - and not just in underfunded and over-ambitious museum exhibits. Read it and weep, doubters!

I don't know who the "artist" (actually Art-o-raptor; art-thief) is, but it's clear that this image is almost entirely traced off of various parts of Greg Paul's iconic Giraffatitan herd drawing.

The original version of Greg Paul's Giraffatitan herd, 1977. The image is from Paul's own website, and perhaps the only copy of this version online. Notice how the plagiarizer flipped around some of the Giraffatitans relative to the original Greg Paul image. The only thing that's noticeably different in the ripoff is the neck pose of the "herd leader".

This is the new, more commonly seen version of the Greg Paul drawing. More accurate conifers, different neck posture, and the addition of a pair of Dicraeosaurus not present in the old version.

But not only is the knockoff image pretty much a direct tracing of the original 1977 Greg Paul version, it's being SOLD for profit online as a "royalty-free" stock image! Here is the link to the store selling it: http://es.inmagine.com/drk006/drk006039-photo

Oddly enough, the ripoff drawing is labeled as a herd of Euhelopus. Guess the art-o-raptor (whoever he or she is) wasn't really that well-informed about different sauropods, or just couldn't be bothered to care what genus or species they were copying from GSP.

All the same, the mere fact that there is indeed the occasional outright commercial ripoff of Greg Paul's work, doesn't change the overall facts on the ground or my previous views on this matter. The presence of fraudsters and ripoffs is NOT legal grounds to claim a monopoly on mere nature-based skeletal poses or sue those who respectfully give credit for non-commercial inspired works (and by "inspired" I mean that the artist put SOME original ideas into them, not just copying them 100% from Greg Paul and only changing superficial color patterns or the like). As you can see on the link, the ripoff-artist in this case did not give any credit to Greg Paul, copied his work almost identically, and is selling it for pure profit without permission, thereby violating all the conditions of scientific courtesy and professionalism, as well as intellectual property law.

However if one gives due credit and does not "sample" the work of others for profit without permission, they are not violating any law, and cannot be put in the same category as the scoundrel who produced the aforementioned ripoff. Paul's overzealous comments against such innocent people are unfounded and ultimately harmful to paleo-art and paleontology as a whole.
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Sauropod Necks - for high browsing, low grazing, or just sex?

2011-06-29T15:46:00.000-07:00

Recently there's been a huge re-ignition of the sauropod neck debate. Originally it was a debate between whether sauropod necks were normally held vertical for high browsing, or horizontal for low grazing (I'd say that's a moot discussion unless we know precisely which sauropods we're talking about, but so goes the watering-down of the subject in the media...). Well now there's a third voice in the debate, and it's in some ways both the most radical and the most obviously practical of the three: the "necks for sex" hypothesis.

Basically there are some paleontologists in the field who argue that the length of sauropod necks had nothing to do with increasing the "feeding envelope" or feeding radius of the animals, but was basically a sexual advertising signal, much like peacock feathers or perhaps hadrosaur crests. Now if you can forgive the flagrant phallic symbolism of such a theory, it actually seems to make a lot of sense. Giraffes, it's been argued, evolved long necks as a result of sexual selection, not for increasing their feeding envelope. Says Dr. Darren Naish:

"In 1996, Robert Simmons and Lue Scheepers argued that the giraffe neck functions as a sexual signal: they said that the necks of males are bigger and thicker than those of females, that the necks of males continue growing throughout life, that females prefer males with bigger necks, and that giraffe necks don't provide any obvious benefit in vertical reach or foraging range, contra the 'traditional', 'increased feeding envelope' hypothesis (Simmons & Scheepers 1996). This has become known as the 'necks for sex' hypothesis...

"It was only a matter of time before someone published the idea that the 'necks for sex' hypothesis might apply to another group of tetrapods famous for their long necks - namely, the sauropod dinosaurs.

In a well argued and extremely popular* Journal of Zoology article, Phil Senter wondered whether sauropod necks might also have evolved under pressure from sexual selection, and not because of any ecological benefit that they might have incurred (Senter 2007) [adjacent figure - from Senter (2007) - shows that surprise!! sauropods have long necks relative to theropods**. The reconstructions are by Greg Paul]. Senter put forward six predictions that - if validated - would indicate the importance of sexual selection in the evolution of the sauropod neck, most of which related to the possibility of sexual dimorphism, the use of the neck in dominance or courtship displays, its redundancy as an adaptation for increased reach in feeding, and allometric increase in neck length across ontogeny and phylogeny. His conclusion was essentially that, yes, the sauropod neck likely evolved primarily under sexual selection pressure (Senter 2007).."

It's a pretty tempting theory. But the fact is, giraffe necks do provide benefits in browsing range. And their high shoulders also give them an additional height boost for high browsing. Is all of this simply a coincidence of sexual selection? Dr. Naish doubts the "necks for sex" theory, and I have to agree with him. Evolving long necks as a purely sexual display device just isn't an efficient strategy. Consider that in birds, it's feathers that get highly modified for sexual display, not the energy-hungry flesh-and-bone parts of the body. Sauropods lacked feathers (or so we're pretty sure!) but they might have had dorsal spines for display. Diplodocus is known to have them, though whether they got truly huge in any species is unknown. Also, with their huge bodies, all that surface area on sauropods might have been brightly colored for sexual display. (As a side note, Allosaurus actually has a pretty long neck for a large theropod - probably to add extra lunging range to make up for its relatively short snout.)

What DID sauropods find sexy?

"Necks for sex" may explain a lot of the odd variations in sauropod necks, which often differ radically from one species to the next. But when thinking about how basic flesh-and-bone structures can become so elongated, I have serious doubts that animals would go through such a heavy expenditure of resources only for sexual selection. After all, that neck needs a lot of oxygen, needs blood, muscles, nutrients, etc. and that's a huge energy demand - it's not just a simple matter of producing a few ounces of keratin here and there like with colorful bird feathers. Nobody has ever suggested that large fleshy structures like elephant trunks or whale flukes are purely there for sex - they serve far more immediate utilitarian purposes - one for gathering food, the other for movement. And once you consider structures that contain both flesh and bone, like long necks... the expenditure of nutrients goes even higher. Calcium for bones, prodigious amounts of L-Arginine for lean muscle, Glycogen for tendons, glucosamine for cartilage disks, huge amounts of sugar compounds for maintaining the massive connective tissues, all the myelin that's needed to coat all the miles of nerves in that neck... all things that require a huge additional amount of food to produce, things that you simply don't need for pure sexual display structures like peacock feathers. Having long necks purely for sex just doesn't seem worth the huge cost of resources. It's a lot easier to grow long external dorsal spines, or simply be colorful, than it is to develop a long neck just for sex.

But then this begs the question - if we supposed for a moment that an intense form of neck-based sexual selection was going on in sauropods, what exactly was being selected for? Only the longest neck possible? If so, why is there such a differing range of sauropod neck sizes?

Necks of large herbivorous dinosaurs from the Morrison formation, with large mammals for comparison, in vertical feeding posture. From Paul, 1998 (for diplodocids, vertical posture would likely require rearing). A) Apatosaurus louisae in lateral and dorsal view. B) Brachiosaurus altithorax (restored after Giraffatitan brancai). C) Camarasaurus lentus. D) Diplodocus carnegiei. E) Barosaurus lentus. F) Stegosaurus (=Diracodon) stenops. G) Giraffe. H) African elephant. I) Indricotherium, the largest land mammal known in the fossil record. Posted for educational purposes only.

As you can see, the sauropod necks are not all of the same length. Different genera have radically differing neck lengths, thicknesses, and anatomy. Did it all come down to females preferring different neck lengths in males across different species? Did Apatosaurus females simply prefer shorter necks than Brachiosaurus females, and thicker ones than Diplodocus females? Were Barosaurus females just that much more picky and hard to please than Diplodocus females, so that despite being so similar in most other aspects, the neck of Barosaurus ended up becoming 50% longer than that of Diplodocus?

I don't know, but that seems an awfully wimpy cop-out explanation to a very scientific problem. You can't simply blame everything on the woman :) Maybe female sauropods did have some pretty odd preferences which were far from consistent across genera. But maybe their tastes had nothing to do with neck size, but rather bright colors or pheromones. Heck, maybe it was even the males that were picky, not the other way around. Being a very big social animal does have certain advantages for experienced males, as anyone who's studied elephants and sperm whales is well aware - the mature bulls get to do all the picking. But in any case, the amazing array of neck lengths, neck thicknesses, neck depths, vertebra counts, and head sizes, is something that I find pretty difficult to explain away simply with sexual selection. And this isn't even the full gamut of sauropod necks. Some are downright bizarre. You've got squat, wide cross-section necks like in Phuwiangosaurus, Puertasaurus, Alamosaurus, and a host of other titanosaurs (the trait probably evolved multiple times). You've got hefty deep necks like Futalognkosaurus. You've got the weird short high-spined necks of Dicraeosaurus and Amargasaurus. You've got the crazy-long, as in Mamenchisaurus, Sauroposeidon, Daxiatitan, and the somewhat more cuddly Euhelopus, the obscenely long, as in Erketu, and then the crazy-short, as in Bonitasaura and Brachytrachelopan. And then you've also got this:

One of the weirdest sauropods in terms of proportions, this is Isisaurus colberti (partial skeletal by Jaime Headden). A mid-sized titanosaur with a crazy-deep monster of a neck that logically doesn't have any good explanation other than sexual display. As much as 75% of the height of each vertebra is made up by the neural arch! Not only that, there are some downright freaky things about the hips and torso (look at those super-flat ilia, that enormously deep chest, high shoulders, and the obscenely long pubis - it even looks like a sex beast!) And then there are the arms, which seem to be all humerus! Now to be fair Jaime has previously said that this skeletal has some proportion issues and is not as accurate as it could be, but all the same it's well known that Isisaurus was one weirdly proportioned dinosaur. And at the very least, one of the most extreme necks ever known. That thing was a walking billboard. The neck isn't unusually long for a sauropod (though if the published data is any clue, it was longer than either the torso or the tail). But its extreme depth (along with all the other odd proportions) serves no apparent biomechanical purpose, and it really could only be a product of sexual selection, with the tall spines turning it into a huge display device. Isisaurus was also one of the last dinosaurs to have lived, roaming the jungles of a then-isolated India in the Maastrichtian, right at the end of the Cretaceous. If dinosaurs had not gone extinct 65 million years ago, one can only imagine how much stranger Isisaurus' descendants could have gotten.

But what about feeding adaptations?

While it's entirely possible that some aspects of neck anatomy may indeed have been the result of sexual selection (especially tall neural arches or spines/sails) I doubt that the length or actual mechanics of the neck were influenced so much by sexual selection as by feeding niches. When you lengthen a functional body part like a neck, especially considering it has your head and mouth at the end of it, there are also very practical, non-display considerations.

For example, if you're a ground feeder with peg-shaped teeth and a square "vacuum cleaner" jaw adapted for nipping low ferns, you're probably going to develop a neck which can be held horizontally or even drooping down for long periods of time, and would not be so long as to make maneuvering difficult in at least lightly forested areas. Ordinarily this would put a lot of strain on the neck, but the diplodocids had a way of compensating for this problem - their posterior neural spines were not just heavily forked to support a twin system of cable-like nuchal ligaments - they were also taller relative to vertebra length than on most other sauropods, and heavily angled forward with prominent ball-like ends to add extra leverage to the tendons pulling them back. Thus even in a relatively relaxed position, the nuchal tendons could effectively keep the neck horizontal without over-exerting themselves. The "canyon" between the double rows of neural spines likely included a third, auxiliary set of ligaments, though the knobs which anchored them at the base of these grooves are only prominent in a few genera. This middle tendon was likely not deep enough to entirely fill the space between the double rows of neural spines in diplodocids, and certainly not in dicraeosaurids.

However, if you're a high browser with large heavy teeth and a rounded snout adapted for foraging in the trees, then a long neck is an ideal tool for high feeding in the trees.

In fact it used to be popular to think that all diplodocoids had horizontal necks, all macronarians had vertical necks, etc. Now there is research that disproves both notions. Whitlock has recently come out with a paper that shows that many diplodocids had rounded snout tips and tooth wear patterns consistent with feeding on conifers - including barosaurs like Tornieria and, strangely enough, short-necked dicraeosaurs too (they were probably rearing to feed on the lower branches of the conifers, as they could not reach very high even when rearing). However Diplodocus, Apatosaurus, and Nigersaurus all have square mouths and tooth wear consistent with feeding on low ferns. Nigersaurus seems to have fed exclusively on low ferns, due to its awesomely wide "vacuum cleaner" mouth. It's doubtful this animal ever fed on tough conifers, though it was capable of rearing. It was basically a dinosaurian cow.

Skulls of diplodocoid sauropods seen from above. From Whitlock, 2011. Note the differences in snout shape between mid-level and high browsers (bottom row), low grazers (Apatosaurus and Diplodocus) and UBER-low grazers (Nigersaurus)!

Where else do we see this dichotomy of high-browsing rounded mouths and low-grazing square mouths?

Camarasaurus, Brachiosaurus, Euhelopus all have rounded mouths/snout tips and big heavily worn teeth - the mark of a high browser (and in the case of the huge-mouthed Brachiosaurus and Giraffatitan, a not particularly picky high browser).

But there are some macronarians which have actually "broken the rules" of their clade to become low-grazers and fill in some of the fern-eating niches left vacant in the Cretaceous by the now-extinct diplodocids. Some derived titanosaurs, notably the short-necked Saltasaurus and the even shorter-necked Bonitasaura, have a very diplodocid-like head, and more importantly, square mouths. Antarctosaurus has an extremely wide "vacuum cleaner" mouth that is a remarkable case of convergent evolution with rebbachisaurids like Nigersaurus. All had square snouts and mouths. Yet remarkably, some of their close relatives, the nemegtosaurids, have far longer necks and narrower, round-tipped snouts suited to high browsing. This is a major parallel with the differences of snout design and feeding habits of Diplodocus vs. Barosaurus. It seems that in many different lineages of sauropods, there were both low grazers and high browsers.

Hint: it's neither for gluttony nor sloth nor lust

However, there's one constant factor (at least more or less constant within most families) that often gets missed. Neck length. Sauropods with vertical feeding habits tend to have much longer necks that low fern eaters - even if they're close relatives. Longer necks are not simply an adaptation for increasing a horizontal ground-level feeding envelope the way proponents of the SNAFU theory ("Sauropod Necks Are Forever Underslung") seem to insist. Barosaurus and Tornieria were high-browsers and they had much longer necks than Diplodocus or Apatosaurus. Furthermore, Apatosaurus is easily twice the mass of Diplodocus, yet has a neck of equal or sometimes shorter length - which proves that as mass increases (and thus your food needs increase) a low-grazer can still consume enough food without needing a proportionally longer neck. In other words, having an extremely long neck when you're a low-grazer is actually a WASTE of precious nutrients and resources that you could be using to feed a bigger body, grow faster to deter predators, etc. As a low-grazing species, once you hit a certain neck proportion, you can get bigger and still keep your neck relatively short (like Apatosaurus) and not have to worry about increasing your feeding envelope beyond that of a far lighter animal like Diplodocus.

Is it really all that hard, after all, to just take a few steps forward when you've consumed everything in your grazing envelope? I thought we'd long moved past the days when sauropods were seen as lazy, lethargic slobs that could barely move their bums at all. The expense of resources for growing a very long neck is too high to justify the increase in feeding envelope size for a sauropod that wasn't even feeding above shoulder level - after all, the limits of lateral mobility on sauropod necks mean that the posterior 75% or so of a horizontal feeding envelope is actually out of reach to a low-grazing sauropod, since the neck can't bend back over its own length like a snake. So the increase in feeding envelope range for horizontal low-grazers with longer necks is marginal at best, since a horizontal feeding envelope isn't really a horizontal cone as commonly depicted in papers - it's more like just the lower half of the base of that cone! A marginal arithmetic increase in this narrow sub-oval arc doesn't justify the huge exponential upfront resource cost of ever longer necks just to avoid the inevitability of having to walk a few steps forward, and that's probably why Apatosaurus's neck was no longer than that of Diplodocus despite being a far more massive and therefore energy-hungry animal. Longer necks are not simply a slothful luxury for low-grazers to get a few more bites while avoiding a few more steps - as such, they would be woefully inefficient in terms of huge extra resource cost vs. the relatively meager benefit of having to walk less - rather, they are an adaptation for something far more specific, something that low-grazing, square-mouthed "vacuum cleaner" diplodocoids didn't even mess with.

Even with advanced 3D computer models, it's clear that low-grazing diplodocid sauropods did not have the extreme neck flexibility to reach the posterior 75% or more of their feeding envelope. Thus every plant in this region was inaccessible to them at any one time. Practically speaking, the envelope is only the front arc of the neck's movement swath, and at most this arc's 3D extent formed only the lower half of a relatively narrow oval. The upper half of a far larger oval envelope would potentially be open to vertical-necked sauropods with longer arms. Image from Stevens, et. al. (1999).

In fact, it's not that far-fetched to say that ALL extremely long-necked sauropods were high browsers. Anything like Brachiosaurus, Giraffatitan, Euhelopus, Omeisaurus, Mamenchisaurus, and many titanosaurs, both basal and derived, would be a high-browser with a neck capable of vertical posture. They all have either massive teeth for crunching through branches, or in the case of barosaurs and nemegtosaurs, tooth-wear patterns and snout shapes that suggest high browsing, perhaps of a more finesse-bound sort. None of these animals have the sharply angled square snout typical of low-grazing fern-eaters.

Skull and mouth shapes of Camarasaurus (C), "Brachiosaurus" (Giraffatitan) brancai (B), Diplodocus (D), Apatosaurus (A), Stegosaurus (E), Indricotherium (I) and some modern animals. From Paul (1998). Note the curved oval mouths/snouts of Giraffatitan and Camarasaurus as opposed to the square, flat-fronted mouths of Diplodocus and Apatosaurus. Posted for educational purposes only.

And logically, an extremely long neck would make maneuvering difficult in tall forests unless it was held vertically or at least semi-vertically. Extremely long tails would make movement in the forest difficult for high-browsers as well, and tails could not be pointed vertically - most high-browsing sauropods simply reduced them. Brachiosaurs are the most extreme example, but there are others. No mamenchisaur or "euhelopodid" ever had a tail comparable in length to that of Diplodocus. And even Barosaurus had a shorter tail than Diplodocus, though both animals were roughly the same size and both had a whip-like tail ending. Thus, extremely long tails (and comparatively short necks) seem to be mainly a feature of low grazing sauropods that fed on the open fern plains, whereas high browers increased the neck (and its typical incline) while reducing the tail, to get at a greater vertical range of food while avoiding getting stuck in the forest. If a complete Supersaurus skull is found, it will probably fit the pattern of high-browsing diplodocids like Barosaurus, even though it's an apatosaurine. It's got the very long neck and relatively modest tail proportions of Barosaurus, and it probably was capable of the same high-browsing behavior - and probably a rounded snout.

Skeletals of Diplodocus carnegiei (F), Barosaurus lentus (G) and Apatosaurus louisae (E) from Paul (1998). Note that Barosaurus has a much longer (and more somewhat vertically capable) neck than Diplodocus, and a proportionally shorter tail (the droopy end of which is missing here). Both the 11-ton Diplodocus and the 20-ton Apatosaurus have fairly modest-sized necks, whereas Barosaurus, which is the same size as Diplodocus, has a far longer neck than either of them. Longer necks are not merely a result of larger size or food needs, and an increase in size and food needs among low-grazers does not correlate with, much less necessitate, longer necks. Posted for educational purposes only.

But what about camarasaurs? They have short necks which can articulate vertically, and they have the snout and teeth of a high-browser - why are their necks not longer? Likely they were not browsing all that high. Like dicraeosaurs, their reach was limited, but could be augmented by rearing. However, it's worthy to note that the teeth of Camarasaurus are more heavily worn than those of some high-browsing sauropods with longer necks. Microwear analysis of these, according to Bakker (1986) indicates they were eating very gritty food, perhaps the result of seasonal dust storms which left grit on the lower levels of conifer trees. As most dust is too heavy to be carried very high, the higher parts of the trees were free from it and caused moderately less wear on the teeth of taller high-browsers. Another possibility is that Camarasaurus was simply a mid-level browser, not a high-browser, and fed on very tough plants like large cycads and the dry lower branches of conifers.

Camarasaurus (upper right, near Allosaurus) had a far shorter neck than Brachiosaurus (large silhouettes, lower left), and even when rearing it could not surpass it in functional height, yet it had the snout tip and teeth of a conifer-eater, not a low grazer. Camarasaurus likely fed on the dry and dust-blown lower branches of conifers, hence its extremely robust and heavily worn teeth (diagram from Paul, 1998 - posted for educational purposes only).

Size and food intake requirements really have nothing whatsoever to do with neck length. "Omeisaurus" tianfuensis is even lighter than the mere 11-ton Diplodocus, yet has a phenomenal neck that absolutely puts it to shame (not to mention Apatosaurus, which weighed roughly 20 tons). Perhaps you could argue that Omeisaurus' crazy-long neck gave it the advantage of a huge vertical AND horizontal feeding envelope - after all, vertical necks imply a full-circle hemispheric feeding envelope, which gives access to far more food at any moment per additional meter of neck than a horizontal wedge-shaped one, regardless of neck flexibility. But in all likelihood, "Omeisaurus" probably didn't need an envelope so big. It was smaller than Diplodocus, (let alone Apatosaurus!) which made do with a much smaller feeding envelope and far less vertical range. Even feeding the extra energy and blood requirements of such a long neck (which might have proved prohibitively high for a low-grazing diplodocid with far tighter vertical limits on its diet and feeding envelope) probably wouldn't require full use of the huge feeding envelope of "Omeisaurus" at every step it walked. After all, the feeding envelope of a 9-ton Omeisaurus was many times the size of that of even a 20-ton Apatosaurus, and far taller as well! It's inconceivable that the neck and heart alone, no matter how large, would somehow use up more nutrients than the 11 additional tons of flesh and bone found in Apatosaurus! So it's unlikely that increasing the feeding envelope was the sole driving force behind some vertical-necked sauropods developing extremely long necks, because many of them probably did not need the entire vertical-capable feeding envelope to meet their energy needs, even with the colossal neck and the powerful heart it required.

The only remaining logical reason for such a dizzying neck is not simply to reach every plant within a vertical-capable neck's entire hemispheric feeding envelope, but to reach a particular food source beyond the reach of shorter necks - most likely the treetops. Extremely long necks are found in both small sauropods like Euhelopus and mega-giants like Sauroposeidon and Puertasaurus. Likewise, relatively short necks are found both on dwarfs like Saltasaurus and giants like Apatosaurus (well, moderately giant anyway). Neck length is more indicative of the type of food you ate and where it was, not how much of it you needed.

"Omeisaurus" tianfuensis. This highly specialized Chinese sauropod, known from better remains than true Omeisaurus, was even lighter and smaller-bodied than Diplodocus, but had a far longer neck and larger potential feeding envelope despite its likely lower food needs. Note the low, posteriorly oriented neural spines and long overlapping cervical ribs typical of all vertical-necked sauropods, regardless of their time period or lineage. Its head is large and round-snouted, typical of high feeders. The club-tipped tail is also fairly short, which makes this an ideal maneuverable design for feeding in dense forests. From an unpublished Greg Paul skeletal, ~1995. Posted for educational purposes only.

Giraffatitan, Diplodocus, Apatosaurus, Indricotherium, Steppe Mammoth, and African elephant skeletals by Greg Paul. Notice how Apatosaurus is more massive than Diplodocus but actually has a shorter neck with much the same horizontal configuration, strange retrograde-tilted neural spines, etc. For educational purposes only. In Giraffatitan and other vertical-necked sauropods (even totally unrelated ones), the spines and cervical ribs have quite a different configuration. Posted for educational purposes only.

End result: Mamenchisaur necks vertical, Macronarian necks vertical (except for saltasaurids and a few other derived titanosaurs), diplodocid necks horizontal (possibly except barosaurines and Supersaurus) and dicraeosaurid necks horizontal but still vertical-capable by rearing. BTW the diplodocid neck mechanics of barosaurs and Supersaurus still would not allow as sharp an incline as in most macronarians. They could have curved the neck up at roughly 45 degrees or reared up like other diplodocids to get at the very high branches. While rearing, these high-browsing diplodocids would have towered over even Brachiosaurus.

Long story short, necks may have served a sexual display or species recognition function, but that alone is insufficient to explain actual neck length differences, which are largely feeding-related. Sex alone cannot justify the vast expenditure of nutritional resources needed for developing some of the longest sauropod necks, as these were energy-costly flesh, blood, and bone structures, rather than simple keratinous cosmetic features like peacock feathers, which are not an integral part of internal anatomy and require far less food intake to maintain. Though sauropod necks were not long simply for sexual reasons, some secondary features of the living neck (such as color and possible display spines) may have had a sexual display purpose. Also, unusual neck width and depth are likely sexually selected display features, particularly in extreme forms like Isisaurus. However, functional length and flexibility were likely free of sexual driving forces for the most part, and were more driven by feeding specializations. Very long necks for high browsers, shorter ones for medium or low browsers. Low shoulders + relatively short neck usually equals low-grazer, but not in the case of Dicraeosaurus. Ultimately, skull and snout shape is one of the best gauges of sauropod feeding habits, and indicates that very long necks are always associated with high browsers, but that not all shorter necks are those of low-grazers.

Say what? I'll show you what a droopy neck looks like!

Of course, Taylor, Wedel, and Naish (2009) have already pretty much busted the myth that sauropods couldn't have raised their necks vertically. They showed (using biomechanical comparisons with living animals, no less!) that sauropod necks can have a substantial range of articulation in each joint well above Osteological Neutral Pose - these were flexible ball-and-socket joints, not stiff flat-ended ones. Indeed, for low-spined forms with very long necks like brachiosaurs and mamenchisaurs, a vertical posture would be far easier to hold up than a horizontal one since the shallow nuchal tendons would be quickly strained in a horizontal posture - imagine holding a long pole at one end horizontally, you can't. Vertically, you can, since gravity is now working with you, not against you. Simple. Diplodocus managed a horizontal posture thanks to its deep and strangely forward-angled "cantilever" neural spine yokes, giving more passive leverage to the nuchal tendons to keep the neck in a horizontal position without over-straining. Barosaurus is an odd case - with its longer neck, would have probably had a steeper habitual neck posture (as illustrated in Paul, 1998) to minimize strain, but the same cantilever design in its lower cervicals meant that they too started off horizontal as in Diplodocus. If it fed while rearing (which was very likely) it would reach great heights without needing to deflect the neck up relative to the back.

In other words, proportional neck length is related to feeding niches, not sex or size/calorie requirements. Long necks for high browsers, shorter ones for medium and low browsers. Macronarians and mamenchisaurs likely used vertical posture to reach food at their particular browsing level, while diplodocoids either reared to reach high, or didn't even bother and just stuck to ferns and seedlings. And if you're still drawing your brachiosaurs or mamenchisaurs with droopy horizontal or underslung necks sticking out like a microphone boom on a movie set - crane 'em up!

Branding and logos: what we SHOULD take away from the Paul drama

2011-05-24T17:10:00.000-07:00

This is intended as something like a capstone to the whole Greg Paul topic. But beyond the recent words of Greg Paul, there is the greater issue of artist branding and what exactly is intellectual property or what is artistic license.

The "No GSP" logo. Free for public use.

I see an issue here which has barely been talked about on ArtEvolved (where many aspects and current issues in Paleo-art, including Greg Paul's explosive comments) have been extensively debated and discussed. While chatting with fellow artist and ArtEvolved member Raven Amos on DeviantArt, I remembered an idea that had been on my mind ever since the Greg Paul copyright debate started on the Dinosaur Mailing List. Create a logo! It's so simple yet so seemingly elusive of a concept to paleoartists. If Greg Paul had put a recognizable logo on all his art, plagiarism of his work would not be as common a problem as he claims it is (though none of us really know how prevalent plagiarism of GSP is, since we have yet to actually see it). You see, artists with a logo get taken more seriously, and don't have to fall back on weak excuses like "my pose is a brand in itself" the way Greg Paul has had to do.

Notably, something that has stuck out like a sore thumb is the relative backwardness of most of the artists in paleoart. I'm not saying this as an insult to anyone - it's simply a disturbing fact. In this age when everyone is branding their work and inventing a logo or a trademark symbol to make it unique, most paleoartists are not doing this. Not only do they not put a logo on their art, they often also don't have one simply for promoting their site. And as a result, we are simply dependent on looking at the poses and arrangement of elements in paintings to identify fraud or ripoffs.

Poses breed Posers

Greg Paul's most incendiary demand is that people not even use a similar pose to the ones he uses when making skeletal drawings. The situation is literally so dismal that Greg Paul, a 30-year veteran of the profession, has resorted to claiming that his poses alone are a brand - this is at best an attempt at branding born out of sheer desperation, far too little and far too late. Poses can be used by others if they're simply based on natural animal movements. The thing is, Greg Paul would probably not be resorting to claiming ownership over a mere pose (and thereby antagonozing most of his colleagues) if he had JUST invented a logo and used it for the past 30 years - though that's assuming that people actually have ripped off his skeletals outright. As I've pointed out before, none of us really know how much of Greg Paul's work has actually been plagiarized for profit by others, as he hasn't actually gone into details. Though I can imagine it might be more pervasive that most of us know, since he has never used a logo on his art.

All the posers that could be out there copying Greg's work probably would not have gone as far as they did if he had a recognizable and publicly visible brand, or for that matter, a website, since the early days of the internet. Instead, from 1995 to 2009 he didn't even have a website, and most lay dinosaur fans and amateur artists only knew him as an obscure and reclusive artist whose dynamic illustrations made some waves back in the 1980s and rarely appear in some dinosaur books by other authors every now and then. Even his own internet-age books, like Dinosaurs of the Air and the Princeton Field Guide, were very poorly promoted online and his website says barely anything about them. No matter how well you know the industry, it's mostly people outside the industry that you have to worry about underbidding you and ripping you off - it's them you need to reach and get to respect you and take you seriously so that plagiarism does not happen. They are the ones who don't know you or respect your brand - because lets face it, these days unless you have a consistent logo for any length of time, you really don't have a brand.

And no, a running pose, a signature, or a silhouette of a nude woman skipping on her tiptoes does not count as a logo (though it could be one if it were modified with some word art instead of being just a scientific scale figure). The logo could even be a tiny thing in white, on top of the blacked-out portions of his more incomplete skeletals. Greg Paul actually does have a logo of sorts, a blacklined version of his charging Triceratops horridus pair from Paul (1991), which appears on his website's header and also on his letterheads. But this never appears on his drawings or paintings, either as an actual stamp or as a digitally added logo.

Greg Paul's site header. Posted here for informational purposes only. Note the Triceratops pair logo at left. This unique logo shockingly does not appear on a single Greg Paul drawing or painting.

This is truly a bad situation for anyone who wants to sell his or her art. A single, fixed logo or mark is far more recognizable than an artistic style. While Greg Paul is lambasting his critics for supposedly not properly respecting the Occult Alchemy of Paleo-Illustration, he might as well put some arcane Master's Mark on his work that will at least brand it and make it recognizable to the uninitiated on the basis of more than just the aesthetic style.

Even a third-rate imitator like Josef Moravec, who is hardly an original artist (and frankly a person I have very little regard for, as he simply rips off the exact scenes of Knight and Burian from 50 years ago, including all their outdated inaccuracies) nevertheless has a logo which he puts on every image of a painting on his website. The entire site oozes with branding and copyright warnings! So you'll have a pretty hard time getting away with stealing or plagiarizing his images, even though he practically makes his living stealing from Knight and Burian, who painted for a pittance in a time when scientific artists' intellectual property rights (and suing over them) were a non-existent issue. Hey, at least Moravec has business acumen, unlike most real paleoartists today, who sadly are stuck in the Dark Ages when it comes to online branding and self-promotion. Some artists actually seem to expect that their very style should be sufficient as a trademark in and of itself! This is beyond naive in today's world. And yet shockingly, this lot complains of fraud.

Woolly mammoths by Josef Moravec (posted for informational purposes only). Notice Moravec's trilobite logo, trademarked corporate brand, and copyright. While this may be total overkill for an image that was copied almost verbatim from a much older Zdnek Burian painting, it's still a prime example of a painter who actually has a logo and a brand.

Zdnek Burian's original woolly mammoths, circa 1950s. Note the matriarch's identical tusk shape, the nearby baby, and the large male off to the left rearground - the poses and locations are almost identical! No logos or recognizable branding for paleoartists in those days - intellectual property wasn't even a relevant issue for them in the early 20th century. As a result they have been the victims of numerous widely reproduced knock-offs and art frauds for decades, of which Moravec is only the recent tip of the iceberg.

Now while earth-tinged agile dinosaurs with large flat lateral surfaces, horizontal stripes, highly angular skin folds, or dappled-scale pencil drawings on coquille board may be "signature" identifiers of a Greg Paul, the reality is that NO artist should be without a logo. We have stayed backward in the sense that we have not moved beyond the Renaissance-era thinking that your paintings and your style are your only calling card. Back then, a master would have several students learn under him, to complete his paintings in his style as per his directions. Their styles would imitate the master though once on their own they would inevitably sign with their own name. But there was no copyright, no logo, no trademarks. Now the world has changed, and you need to brand with a logo. Relying only on poses or styles as a brand is an open invitation to posers who won't think twice about not asking your permission to copy an entire life scene outright from the exact same angles, never mind just using a similar pose for a simple skeletal profile drawing. A unique human scale figure is not enough, there are a million of them and barely anyone remembers the difference, since in most cases it's just another generic human. YOU NEED A LOGO.

But your majesty, a logo can still be copied, plagiarized, or cut out altogether - how does it solve anything?

It solves the problem of having nothing but a signature to identify your work - branding isn't a guarantee against fraud, but it DOES make your name and work more recognizable in non-scientific or artistic circles. After all, do you really want only paleoartists and art collectors to know what name goes with the painting? Or would you rather put a recognizable mark on it that at least can get associated symbolically with your style and work in the minds of the public? The human mind remembers images better than fonts, it's symbols that rule the world of marketing, and some say, even rule the world.

Now I'm not saying that a brand or a logo will prevent every attempt to reproduce or imitate an artist's work without permission. It's inevitable that someone, in some foreign country somewhere, will post your work on some website or blog without your permission. But what a logo (and an accompanying copyright notice) can do is make it public knowledge that you DO have exclusive ownership of your art and are willing to admit ti to the world - and even if someone reposts it on the internet without your permission, the next circle of poeple who see it on that person's site may be inclined to ask your permission if they see the logo and the copyright, and be less likely to simply copy it all over the web. People instinctively respect or attribute and aura of authority to any official-looking seal or logo more than just a cheaply photoshopped copyright notice in Times font. It's practically hard-wired in our brains. Now the downside it you don't want to completely obscure or deface your own art with a big centrally placed watermark or logo - it may deter outright copying, but it also makes your work less attractive publicly to paying customers or even those interested in using it for non-commercial purposes with permission.

Putting the logo in a corner or somewhere that it does not obviously mar the main image is more visually attractive to the viewer - much like how ancient Chinese painters stamped their red signature seal in the corner (I never figured out why some of those paintings feature multiple seals though... unless multiple artists produced them). However this is more prone to cropping fraud - the thief will simply digitally crop the image to remove the logo. But if someone removes the logo and the copyright by airbrushing them out or by simply cropping the image, you can potentially pursue legal action since they deliberately removed your proof of ownership (this only is feasible if you can document that you have put the logo on ALL your work since you started using it). If your work appears somewhere without your logo, without your permission, this can be additional proof in your favor. Even better is sticking logos in unique places away from the edges where they are not very big but can't be easily removed or cropped without noticeably altering the appearance of your drawing or painting - for example, on a rock or a tree, or even in an empty dinosaur nest or a footprint. Of course for this your logo must be simple, bold, and easily recognizable from a distance - something that Greg Paul's fine-lined charging Triceratops pair isn't really so good at.

Expecting to brand a style alone is a bit of a pipe dream unless it is so unique and so successful that nobody can reproduce it without actually attributing their forgery to you instead of themselves. However, a style combined with a recognizable logo, now that's something more solid. M.C. Escher even converted his initials into a logo, which went on every print he ever made. He was far ahead of his time when it came to branding his work.

M.C. Escher, Man with Cuboid. Wood engraving, 1958. Notice the distinctive "MCE" logo. A lot more recognizable and brandable than a human silhouette or a cursive signature, and what's more, it appears in identical form on practically all of Escher's work.

So I've got a logo now. Do you?

My new, simple, and oddly enough, non-paleo Paleo King logo (I don't plan to limit myself just to paleo-art - and besides, we can't all use images of fossil hammers, recycled JP T. rex skull motifs or raptor claws). Posted for informational purposes only.

My advice to all fellow artists is currently (and it may change in the future) this: Regardless of what part of the world you live in, or what the copyright laws are in your country, invent a logo for yourself (it doesn't even have to be very fancy or even paleo-related) and put it somewhere on all your subsequent work. It's not that hard, acts as a deterrent (at least in countries with strong copyright laws) and can save you a lot of hassle if someone actually doesn't take the hint and rips off your work in any capacity. I don't claim to be a legal expert, but I do see value in branding your work, and by that I mean really branding it, with a unique, repeatably identical, and preferably simple logo no other artist is using, not merely a natural animal pose that is a common scientific convention repeated in the literature for many different animals. We may blast Greg Paul now for his emotional reactions to his situation, but a lot of us are just as unprepared, lacking any logo or real branding, and thus potentially in danger of falling into the same trap.

The new look - what are your thoughts?

2011-05-19T17:27:00.000-07:00

This is pretty off-topic but short. As most of you probably noticed, I have changed the look of this blog pretty recently. I was getting tired of the old basic look and some people were claiming that the contrast of the colors hurt their eyes, so I went for something a bit more interesting and less intense on the eyes. It's not really paleo-related, but to get that you pretty much have to make a custom template which I unfortunately don't have time for now.

So, paleo-fans, what do you think? Do you like the new look of this blog better, prefer the old look, or think there's an even better template I should use?

Also, for those of you doing paleo-art, feel free to copy and paste this logo proudly on your site or your art if you're not using GSP as a reference:

The Strange Journey of David Peters

2011-05-14T16:40:00.000-07:00

Well some of you might already know this, but David Peters is back!

That's right, the paleoartist whose pterosaur faux-pas and downright bizarre illustrations backfired on him and made him a paleo-pariah had returned. Now he has a new and much more detailed website, and it seems he's at it again.You may remember a few years ago that Peters got a huge pile of flak from researchers in the field for his downright bizarre pterosaur illustrations and his theories on their evolution. Just looking at the things makes your eyes hurt.

Drawing of Pterodactylus (yes, I said Pterodactylus, NOT Pteranodon) based on David Peters' theories. Actual drawing by Cevdet Koseman and John Conway, not Peters.

Actual David Peters skeletal drawing of Pterodactylus. Yes, he actually believes it had a crest, all those crazy neck wattles, and a much longer tail than usually depicted.

I've NEVER seen evidence of such a tail in Pterodactylus fossils.

Peters became the target of much criticism and mockery from the field (not all of it undeserved, I might add) for his downright weird pterosaur illustrations and equally weird theories on their origins and anatomy. The field sees him as more or less of a crank. And after years of almost no internet activity and a dead web site, he's BACK! And he's causing a bit of a stir in the paleo-community. But first, who is David Peters?

Some brief background

Those who already are familiar with his history can skip this paragraph. David Peters is a commercial/advertising artist who got involved in paleo-art back in the 90s, doing paintings for a few dinosaur books and even authoring his own book on evolution, From The Beginning. It's a very interesting and beautifully illustrated book, Peters certainly has tons of talent and knowledge of reptile and mammal evolution.

Two T. rex attack Quetzalcoatlus by David Peters.

Great stuff, though a tree-climbing Quetz looks a bit weird.

His dinosaur paintings are also pretty impressive and accurate, a lot like Greg Paul's work. In fact, Peters may well have become the next Greg Paul if he hadn't biffed it on the pterosaurs.

So what happened with those pterosaurs anyway?

David Peters, around 2000 or so, began theorizing about Pterosaurs in detail. His first contention (shown on this web page) was that the traditional bat-winged model of pterosaur wings was incorrect and that they were actually free-legged and some could even run bipedally on the ground. This is actually something I tend to agree with, as the notion of bat-like wings extending all the way to the knees or ankles looks to me to be based entirely on squished fossils with displaced and torn wing membranes. However, things quickly went downhill from there...

Peters then postulated that pterosaurs were not archosaurs, but prolacertiformes - in other words, that they were not cousins of dinosaurs, as most palontologists accept, but actually more closely related to lizards. While this is the less popular of the two theories, Peters emphatically contends that pterosaurs were lizards, and that anyone who disagrees just isn't ready to open up to the facts (keep in mind Peters doesn't have a degree in any paleo-related field - not that this discredits him, but he's up against some pretty well-established PhDs). However, the majority of pterosaur researchers, including Dr. David Unwin, Dr. Mark Witton, Dr. David Hone, and Mike Habib, agree on an archosaurian origin for pterosaurs, not a lizard-like one. My verdict on the lizard theory: FAIL! Peters even draws pterosaur skulls in such a way as to make them LOOK more lizard-like than they actually are, and also distorts the proportions of several bones and joints, not to mention adding all the wacky crests, wattles, artificially long pterodactyloid tails and imaginary skin appendages which may just be displaced soft tissue, impressions of intestines and the like. He also never adequately addresses the clearly archosaurian (and on top of that, ornithodiran) ankle joints of pterosaurs.

So why the heck this guy so unpopular?

There are several reasons. First, he's generally had an abrasive way of answering his critics. Second, he hounded and trolled researchers of the opposing archosaur-origin view, like Dr. David Hone (more on that later). And third, he acted like his methods are more reliable than the firsthand analyses of PhD professors. And what were his methods? Basically Photoshop. That's right, he just traced features in pictures of the fossils in Photoshop, without ever having seen them in person. And this is supposedly an 'accurate' way to restore crushed pterosaur fossils, according to him. I can see this approach working with sauropods or other big animals whose bodies are rarely preserved with any sort of soft-tissue impression anyway, and are not easily squashed. But for delicate creatures like pterosaurs, especially one found in slab fossils with mashed-up soft tissue stains, it's woefully problematic.

Look for example at Peters' strangely palm-tree-like skeletal of Longisiquama, the weird "proto-lizard" which he claims was an ancestor of pterosaurs (and ironically is also claimed by some BANDits as the ancestor of birds!)

Now look at how he traced so many hypothetical "structures" on the fossil slab which aren't even visible in the image (and conceivably not even with increased contrast) to get his skeletal concept.

Look at all those little weird filament outlines! Is that stuff real? I don't see most of it in the fossil photograph!

Dr. Michael P. Taylor of SV-POW was willing to keep an open mind and test David Peters' Photoshop fossil tracing technique, with results of a uniquely British manner of hilariosity.

Eventually, Peters put up his own garish-looking website, www.pterosaurinfo.com, which was full of his off restorations of pterosaurs and proto-lizards. The site soon after closed down. Apparently he closed down the site because it wasn't getting a lot of attention from paleontologists, and he didn't consider it worth the money to keep it up (again, more on that later). Peters has also implied in many instances that his photoshop method is equally or more accurate than diagrams and drawings by people who have actually seen the real fossils. Ridiculous, since photos can contain false data, and the human brain can potentially create more false data by how it interprets the photos. David Marjanovic responded to Peters' claims as follows:

In each and every one of these examples, you simply assume that your  interpretations of photos were correct and other people's  interpretations of the specimens themselves were wrong.

That can only be tested by going back to the specimens and looking at them, which you didn't. Your self-confidence is getting in the way of testing your hypotheses.

Peters has historically reacted badly to this kind of criticism. He has repeatedly hounded experts in the field like Dr. David Hone, who has many times made clear that trolling and internet harassment is no substitute for publishing a rebuttal paper, and that tracing photos is no substitute for seeing a real fossil specimen in person.

In addition, on the DML, Peters has made some rather inane and insulting arguments about how a photograph is no worse than the original specimen and that scientists drawing from the real specimen can't get any better results than an amateur tracing from a photograph - only to get shot down by pretty much EVERY scientist who responded. In response Peters heckled the experts some more, "challenging" them to test if they could do better drawings of the fossils with their methods than he could with Photoshop tracing - as if this subjective contest somehow circuitously proved his argument about pterosaurs being lizards. It really wouldn't prove anything of the sort. Cries of "crackpot" ensued.

Then things REALLY got ugly. Here's one of Peters' diatribes against Dr. Mike Taylor.

Mike Taylor:

David Hone is right. Photos are no substitute for seeing a specimen. Sorry.
That's how it is.

David Peters:
References? Experiments?

Mike, with your "That's how it is" paradigm we would have no relativity, no integrated baseball and the earth would be the center of a tiny universe only a few thousand years old.

Mike Taylor:

All Right, Dave. Unlike some other list members, I've always made the effort to treat your work with respect. That's over now. With this message, you've crossed a line. You equate the preferential use of fossils over photographs with institutionalised racism? That doesn't quite invoke Godwin's law, but it's close enough that I'm not going to bother playing this game any more.

Just in case anyone else was too dim to understand this perfectly simple thing: "That's how it is" is not a REASON to adhere to the status quo, but a DESCRIPTION of what has been established, by scientific inquiry as orthodox. So if Dave Peters comes to me and says "My tracings of aeriel photographs show that the Earth is flat", I will reply "No, the earth is round; that's how it is". Because something that has been so emphatically and repeatedly demonstrated is not worth the energy of arguing about. We're done with that. Move on. 

(And this, of course, is why David Hone isn't pissing away his time playing your stupid games. As you'll have noticed from his impressive recent record, he's spending that time on writing papers instead -- doing science. Proper, reproducible science based on actual fossils rather than JPEG artifacts and the phase of the moon. I might suggest that you go and do likewise but the last few years have clearly demonstrated that you won't. So I'll leave it there.) 

*headdesk*

A paleontologist who studied a fossil firsthand could try to reason with Peters a million times that such-and-such blot really is just a random natural feature of the rock rather than a soft-tissue structure of the pterosaur, and it wouldn't matter how good his drawing was, Peters still could refuse to believe him. But think about it - which one has actually SEEN the real fossil? Of course it should be pretty clear to everyone that looking at photographs is no substitute for studying the real fossil in person. I'd say Heinrich Mallison summed it up best:

I'd like to point out to Mr. Peters that he has, I have heard from
reputable sources, in the past interpreted a specimen as preserving
soft tissues when in fact the layer that the fossil was in was
prepared away all around the bones, so that what he was seeing on the
photograph was in fact a pedestal.
No further comment on that needed. Nor do his attacks on Dr. Hone merit comment.

Also, I'd like to direct him and all other interested parties to my
assessment of a 'I have not seen it so I use published drawings
instead' based drawing of Plateosaurus by Greg Paul (who has done
awesome work on many other occasions):
http://www.app.pan.pl/article/item/app20090075.html

Not seeing a specimen = higher risk of errros than seeing it
Seeing a specimen once or twice = higher risk of errors than being
able to see it repeatedly, and play with the bones
Preconceived notion = error guaranteed.

So, Mr. David Peters, please stop whining. Dave Hone was spot on with
his post, as any reputable scientist knows.

Best,
Heinrich

I couldn't have said it better myself - even the best photos are no substitute for the real thing. Even casts are no substitute, since you can't do histological studies on them.

If photos captured every detail perfectly and could differentiate between preserved organic structures and simple stains/paint smudges/impurities in the rock, then what would we even need fossils for? Why didn't the Field Museum simply let some private collector buy 'Sue' at auction, when a photo would be just as scientifically informative?!?!?! Why did they spend millions of dollars putting every one of Sue's bones through a gazillion CAT Scans and X-ray slices when they could just take a simple photo and learn everything from that? Why don't they just sell their Apatosaurus fossils, the Brachiosaurus type specimen, and those massive Argyrosaurus femurs they've been keeping for well over a century? After all there are plenty of detailed photos of those, plus they're old non-digital pictures and don't have the pixel distortion of digital photos! Think of all the money they would have to fund more research! Who needs fossils anyway?

Who indeed...

Fact is, without having the actual fossils, more than half of the paleo-research that gets done today would be impossible. Practically ALL of Larry Witmer's work, Mary Schweitzer's work, and any papers on internal structures of bone histology could never have happened if the fossils didn't exist.

That's why the loss of Amphicoelias fragillimus is so lamented among sauropod workers.

It's why so many sauropod workers don't take Yadagiri and Ayyasami seriously - because they only produced a few incredibly crappy drawings for Bruhathkayosaurus and never excavated any of the alleged fossils despite hyping up the thing as the biggest dinosaur ever - now they conveniently claim the whole thing is lost forever, got washed away in a monsoon no doubt! (Yeah right, and I have a bridge on the Indus to sell these guys!)

It's why the destruction of the original Spinosaurus, Carcharodontosaurus, and Aegyptosaurus type material in World War II was such a big loss for science. Even from a strictly superficial visual standpoint, the existing drawings and photos of that material, while very detailed and beautiful, still leave out a lot of details that can only be observed in person.

If photos and tracings really told it all, nobody would care what happens to fossils. Fossil poaching and commercial collecting wouldn't be a major concern in the field, in fact it wouldn't be a concern at all. The SVP wouldn't have a conflict of interest clause in its membership policy, nor would it have so many explicit bylaws and disciplinary policies against digging up fossils for profit. Take it from me, I've been a member since last year and I've read their entire bylaws section at least 10 times. The whole thing is one huge anti-fossil poaching ethics code. The real fossils DO MATTER.

Perhaps the biggest problem with David Peters is that nobody in paleontology seems to have the time to bother testing the efficiency of David Peters' indirect observation tracing methods more than David Peters. Everyone with a PhD is too busy analyzing the real fossils IN PERSON and publishing research to bother with testing a Photoshop method that's prone to much human error and misperception.

Jaime Headden had this to say on Peters:

He really is a nice guy and is fully willing to discuss and talk with you and your theories (even about his theories) at leisure. I met Dave before the photointerpretive technique began to be employed, and we discussed the identity of elements of the Batrachognathus skull in some depth, but I've not had the opportunity to sit down and retrace his observations, though I have used some similar techniques in piecing out elements of the Protarchaeopteryx robusta skull, counting "dentition", etc. Dave is also aware that people don't believe in his position, and that some people have not bitten his technique. He chalks this up as because there are too many people who are not willing to try his technique as he does it.

So far, no one I know of has tried to do a double-blind test of the technique, allowing third parties to take pieces of specimens at high resolution, use the technique, and compare with strict visual observation. This would actually take a lot of money or a reasonably-sized collection of specimens from different sedimentologic and depositional regimes.

One of the biggest problems here is that Dave is not a geologist, and while some of us have not held this against him, his strategy requires some knowledge of the method by which these fossils arrive in their current condition, including the process of slab-splitting and irregular preparation.

So then whatever happened to David Peters?

After fighting for his initial research which involved the Photoshop method and all his speculative sails, wattles and filaments which were mostly just artifacts of preparation, random splotches in the rock, or indecipherable blurred areas in grainy photographs, Peters seemed to have taken a hiatus. He had a website for a while, www.pterosaurinfo.com. This site apparently had citations of his (apparently meager) published work and some very odd pictures and figures. He shut it down allegedly due to lack of interest from the paleo-community. This old exchange on a message board is pretty telling of David Peters and how the paleontological profession views him:

> In a discussion about whether Noach & sons may have used pterosaurs as 
> flying mounts (don't ask), a participitant invoked a certain David 
> Peters, the possessor of a website on pterosaurs at 
> www.pterosaurinfo.com with a ghastly colour scheme,  as an authority for 
> what seems to be pretty extreme sizes and abilities for larger 
> Azhdarchids, particularly Quetzalcoatlus. Numbers like 18m wingspan and 
> 400-500 kg weight were mentioned, which is alot bigger than any other 
> estimate i can find on the net. It was also implied this monster was 
> capable of power flight! 
>  
> Looking around at the net, many popular pages refer enthusiastically to 
> Mr Peters and his webpage, but it seems professional pterosaur workers 
> consider him an unscientific phantast. I was wondering what people here 
> think of him. 
 
David Peters is well known among the Pterosaur & Dinosaur workers. He is 
not in the academia and many people in academia take a rather dim view of 
him. Go to Dinosaur Mailing List Archive (http://dml.cmnh.org/) and 
search for David Peters to see his posts and replies by pterosaur workers 
from academia, specially Chris Bennett & David Unwin.   

Well there you have it. Peters in a nutshell.

Thing is, pterosaurinfo.com has long been defunct. You can't even find the URL when you type it in a Google search!

For a while we all pretty much thought David Peters was gone and perhaps only popped up every now and then to bug Dave Hone on his blog. He also voiced some comments at the administrators of ArtEvolved a while back, over an old post of mine on that blog - he accused me of character assassination, whereas I did no such thing - I merely criticized his theory and methods, not his character (which I know nothing about, to be sure, since I've never met the guy). I have no interest in "character assassinating" Peters, as I admire a lot of his art (mainly his dinosaurs and proto-mammals) and the huge amount of work he put into his book From the Beginning. Though he's mainly a commercial advertising artist, he had a very bright future in paleoart back in the 90s, and it saddens me more than anything else to see him get bogged down in petty disputes over photoshop pterosaurs or repeatedly pestering PhD researchers on their own blogs or the DML.

But wait - Peters is Back!

Now the sole and solitary grand master of pterosaur knowledge (technically indirect to the nth degree through the loss of data inherent in all photographs and 2d representations, but hey, who cares about all that) has made his return.

The return of David Peters has actually taken not one but two forms.

The first is his new (and extremely tricky to navigate) paleontology website, www.ReptileEvolution.com. It's chock full of his wacky skeletal diagrams of pterosaurs, ancient lizards, archosaurs, proto-mammals, and proto-reptiles, among many other obscure creatures.

Here, among some semi-credible skeletals of primitive reptiles, you can find all of his weird and laughable interpretations (and most of his Photoshop tracings) of pterosaurs, including his artificially long-tailed Pterodactylus, his mysteriously palm-tree-backed Longisiquama, and his sail-backed, vampire fanged Jeholopterus (which actually influenced an episode of the British sci-fi sitcom Primaeval):

That tail is way too long, but that's the least of this picture's problems. There were no vampire fangs on these little pterosaurs. The "fang" was simply a strut of skull bone that got displaced in the fossil. The field has roundly rejected this restoration as unscientific. He looked at displaced fur impressions which seemed to be well outside the rib cage and automatically assumed the creature had a fuzzy sail extending far above its back. This is the same basic mistake he makes with plenty of fossils, assuming that squished, displaced soft tissue stains represent how the soft tissues looked in life! In reality there was no such sail, the skin and fur just got displaced sideways when the animal was compressed during the sedimentation process.

A couple of warnings about ReptileEvolution.com: First off, the site is NOT a compendium of the sum total knowledge of the field - while Peters names thousands of specimens and cites some literature here and there, much of the actual content and opinions in the site come solely from the mind of David Peters. It's all his own interpretations of everything, some plausible, others outlandish, and the only citations on the site that actually back up his theories and rampant criticism of established PhDs are his own. There's even a large rant page specifically devoted to attacking and undermining the claims of those in the field. Some of the "rebuttals" on this page make some sense, others are just flat-out ludicrous, and yet others are so obscure and pedantic that I have no idea whether or not they have a grain of truth to them.

Second, there is NO curriculum vitae anywhere on the site, so people not familiar with Peters and the sort of research he has done will just end up confused as to how much experience he really has with paleontology - and it's VERY easy to sway layman's opinion with your art when you can grind out the kind of detailed drawings that Mr. Peters regularly does.

However, there is a CV of his published work on his other site - this is the second form of his reappearance on the web, basically a hub site that has links to all his projects, both paleo-related and otherwise. There are only 8 papers listed, and only half of these are related to his extreme theories of pterosaur origins and anatomy. While most are in peer-reviewed publications, they are largely not all that controversial or direct. The most important and incendiary entry in his CV is not peer-reviewed however - it was a talk given by Peters at a pterosaur convention in Germany, and it's his core cited "source" for claiming that Pterosaurs are lizards not archosaurs based on Photoshop manipulation. I'm not sure any of his Photoshop methods would actually stand up to peer review.

Epilogue?

What can we say... I suppose there are still many chapters in the story of Mr. Peters still to play out. The fact that he's made a comeback on the internet probably means that he's going to make some attempt to spark more pterosaur controversy. The guy's got an ENORMOUS amount of art talent, his websites look pretty good from a purely visual/aesthetic point of view, and he can probably grind out a million skeletals and trace nearly as many fossil photographs and drive to work all at once! So mad props to him for that. Though I really wish he would produce more of his gorgeous books about dinosaurs and fewer pseudo-pterosaur Photoshop oddities - it's making it exponentially harder to take him seriously. Yet his skills as a painter really are (or at least were) top-notch, and I admire the heck out of his dinosaur and proto-mammal art. And if he'd stuck to painting dinosaurs and left the fossil analysis of squashed pterosaurs to the people who actually have studied the real fossils, he'd be a major player in paleo-art today, possibly even bigger than Greg Paul or many others. His books on prehistoric animals are STILL some of the best-illustrated ones you can find, and despite some inaccuracies with things like unfeathered raptors with protoptagia (skin-flaps on the front of the arms) his dinosaur work is remarkably on point.

His current website Reptile Evolution is borderline pseudoscientific, but it's relatively easy to change; most of the cited literature and even a bit of of the analysis is fine, it's just his illustrations and inferences that need fixing. I hope some day he'll take a second look at this stuff and clean it up (though based on all his DML debates, heckling of Dr. Hone and others, and what Dr. Taylor said after finally being pushed too far, I sadly doubt Mr. Peters will ever do such a thing).

I'm also a really big enthusiast of seeing how phylogeny and evolution turn out with every new analysis, and the kind of work Peters did for his book From the Beginning is extremely impressive (though admittedly HOW he decided which animals to put in the mammalian evolutionary sequence perplexes me to no end).

His other books, like GIANTS and A Gallery of Dinosaurs and Other Early Reptiles were also fine works of art and scale. Nobody else has really been able to produce the same effect of relative size and scale in dinosaur or nature books, and get so many things right in proportions (Gallery of Dinosaurs has a few errors, but nothing all that bad for a dinosaur book of the 90s, and is arguably one of the best nonfiction children's books ever written) and a pretty decent job with colors. So I definitely have a lot of respect for David Peters as an artist and an author of popular books on the most amazing creatures that have ever lived.

His collaboration with Don Lessem for the books Raptors! and Supergiants! was pretty impressive too, lots of detail there that, though a bit rushed, nevertheless can compare with the work of Greg Paul and Wayne Barlowe. A great eye for color and shadow, 3D form, and functional skeletal anatomy. Supergiants! came later and is the better book, not just because I like sauropods, but because the art is generally more accurate and better quality (though the dismal scan quality from Amazon.com doesn't come close to doing it justice).

All in all, Peters had a lot going for him as a paleo-artist. Perhaps deep down inside he still might. Maybe he has a small chance of salvaging his reputation in the paleo-sphere. Most would say probably not, based on everything he's done since 2000. But I don't want to say for sure just yet.
And I'd really like to see him 'return to his roots' so to speak, and produce more of the type of solid, respectable work you see just above, work that got him so much positive acclaim back in the 90s.

It's just incredibly sad and disturbing to see where he went after all that.

Exposing the Occult Alchemy of Paleo-illustration!

2011-04-30T02:03:00.000-07:00

This will be hopefully my last post on the Greg Paul situation for now. It's also my repository for the distillation of a LOT of twisted and confused thoughts I've been having on this subject recently... so bear with me if some of this doesn't make sense. I really need to get back to grinding out those dinosaurs. Especially those Forgotten Giants.

But one more issue remains to be raised - moving beyond the bitter rants of one man.

Practically, how will this fiasco affect paleo-art? Honestly, probably not that much. People are furious with Gregory S. Paul, but the majority of artists aren't going to change how they do things just to please him - largely because they weren't doing anything illegal in the first place! Those who genuinely want to rip him off will continue to do so. Those who felt bad for him now largely don't want anything to do with him. And even scientists who used his skeletal restorations as the basis for their own non-commercial published skeletals in peer reviewed journals, are seriously considering never consulting his work as a reference again.

And thus he will eventually implode and fade away into irrelevance rather than dominating the bizz.

In fact, in the same vein as what Zach Miller coined as his internet meme: "No Greg Paul skeletals were referenced for the production of this illustration", I have made a neat little logo to go with the meme which you can stick on ANY dinosaur artwork you produce which does not use any Greg Paul references (preferably high-quality accurate work than can be compared with Paul's in the same paragraph, but hey feel free to use it however you want, I'm not copyrighting this bad boy).

I took a random picture I found online of one of those cheesy old-school "NO MSG" neon signs you see in Chinese restaurants in most big cities in North America. Then I just messed around with it a little bit in MS Paint and Pixia. And voila - NO GSP!

That's right kids. Use this logo every time you want the world to know you didn't use any reference from GSP. But don't use GSP. Don't "steal" the magician's secrets!

So first let's finally evaluate Mr. Paul's claims and demands in a nutshell.

1. Plagiarism is horrible and should be punished, stop copying Greg Paul works for profit! VALID. Even so, I have never seen a single book or museum illustration that was a ripoff of Greg Paul's work - most are just lousy rehashes of either Jurassic Park dinosaurs or the same old tail-dragging slop by obscure Knight-clone painters from 50 years ago. He's exaggerating the pervasiveness of the problem.

2. Stop undercutting and devaluing paleoart! VALID, to an extent - new artists need to have complete information. And total newcomers to the industry can't realistically demand veteran wages.

3. Companies and museums, STOP gouging artists and running way over budget on excessively large projects, pleading poverty, etc. and if you want the Greg Paul look, hire Greg Paul for a fair price. VALID.

4. Artists, stop imitating the "Greg Paul look". IMPRACTICAL - just as some artists are Jurassic Park fans who only draw Horizon/JP-style dinosaurs, there are other artists who consider "Greg Paul" style the most appealing or accurate (Oyvind Padron/Dewlap/John Conway/etc.). That said, most artists are not making money from dinosaurs, their "Greg Paul look" isn't even competing on the market and is no threat to Greg Paul!

5. Stop using Greg Paul skeletals as references unless you're prepared to pay a fee for each skeletal! BOGUS. Many paleo-artists have already bought Paul's newest book, the Princeton Field Guide, just so that they can have a big source of reference skeletals for future projects! Now they have to pay extra for right to merely get creative ideas from them? Get real, Greg. Even the IRS doesn't tax the same thing twice.

6. Do your own skeletals if you need anatomical references for your dinosaur scenes! FAIL. There isn't even one artist who did skeletals for every single dinosaur before doing it in a scene, including Greg Paul. Everyone has used the schematics of others before. It's just how science works. You can't privatize anatomical knowledge - that's like the Gray's Anatomy publishers saying nobody can use their book as a reference to draw humans!

7. When making skeletals, go to the museums and take your own photos, measure every bone inch by inch - don't reference anyone else. INSANE. Nobody can afford to fly to every museum, measure it all by hand. Greg Paul himself doesn't do this most of the time - he actually copies and traces bones (surprise, surprise!) from other people's scale diagrams published in scientific papers. Here's proof, copy it and pass it around!

8. Don't use the same poses as Greg Paul in your skeletals (left foot pushing off, alternating strides in quadrupeds), invent your own pose or he will sue you! NONSENSE. Greg Paul can't sue anybody for using a pose, there are NO legal grounds for it - they are natural poses that represent the natural extremes of limb movements in dinosaurs based on living animals! Good thing Scott Hartman isn't thinking of "owning" whatever new pose he decides to go with.

9. If you think all of the above is unreasonable, get out of paleo-art, you all suck anyway, leave it all to Greg Paul! IRRESPONSIBLE AND PARANOID. The Paleo-art field is in need of unity, not division. Nobody has a monopoly on poses, referencing, or science. A scientist should actually appreciate that others reference his schematics, rather than stealing the credit themselves! Some people never use Greg Paul skeletals as reference, this doesn't make them crappy painters. Others do, this doesn't make them frauds or plagiarizers.

Science versus art is not the issue here - art is depiction, it can involve science or not. Science however is not a vacuum or a sealed box. When you consider that Greg Paul skeletals have been published in his peer-reviewed scientific papers, it becomes impractical to privatize them when it comes to non-profit uses.

If I want to use a specific copyrighted Greg Paul image for commercial purposes I will be glad to cough up royalties. But we're not talking about that anymore. Now we're talking about general things like poses, and indirect anatomical referencing using Greg Paul as merely one reference out of many in original works by others (NOT Greg Paul reproductions). Many of which are non-commercial in nature in any case. Charging for similar poses? SUING for similar poses? Really?

Craig Dylke of ArtEvolved had this to say about Paul's legal threats:

As for the lawsuits I wouldn't worry about them. Talking to one of my lawyer buddies (yes I socialize with lawyers!) about the philosophical and legal implications of Paul's emails, he informed me this is CLEARLY a case of a desperate man with no legal leg to stand on. If he could successful sue people, he WOULD be sueing them instead of mass emailing vague and insane threats to scare people away from his industry. If he had a real case he'd have lawyers more than eager to launch the proceedings.

Don't take the threats seriously (unless you really are plagiarizing and profiting from his work without permission). Drawing a dinosaur that just happens to look like it could be a Greg Paul dinosaur is not a crime, and good luck trying to prove to a judge and jury that have no clue about dinosaur anatomy that the thing was actually copied from a specific genuine Greg Paul work.

So the confusion is that Greg Paul seems to be unable to decide if skeletals are devices of science (i.e. freely available for educational and anatomical reference purposes that do NOT involve copying or reproduction of his work), or should we treat it as forbidden trade secrets like the recipe for Cola-Cola?

Consider that for 30 years Greg Paul has published his work and inspired a whole "school" of budding paleoartists, and even pro artists with radically different style STILL use his work as anatomical background reference rather than digging through libraries for scientific journals and papers (I'm not naming names, but most still do). Now suddenly all that free exchange of information and acknowledgments is to be stopped?

Greg Paul the scientific artist vs. Greg Paul the occult Alchemist!

If the skeletals are indeed forbidden trade secrets like the formulas of a Dark Ages alchemist (ignoring the fact that you can buy them in book form so they're not really secret at all) then there's basically a dead-end to their usefulness. People may buy and look at these books, but can't use the illustrations for reference... so it's just supposed to sit and look pretty on a shelf! Reminds me of people who buy a fancy gold-edged history book or even a holy text, and they never read it, it just sits on their shelf gathering dust. The tomes of medieval magicians and alchemists still exist and you can even buy English translations of them some places - but will anybody ever use them in our time, apart from the fringes?

I'd love to avoid that fate with the Princeton Field Guide. But as it stands, it WILL gather dust on my shelf.

I'm not afraid of getting sued for referencing Greg Paul - rather, I'm just so sick of this charade, of confusing indirect referencing for outright plagiarism, of condemning legal "homages" as immoral, and of all the antagonistic drama that hangs around the guy both on and off the DML, that I'm not going to use GSP skeletals as references any more. Not that I ever used them to any great degree, much less for any of my recent work. Even despite the fact that he gave me a huge pile of large-format skeletal printouts of his as a free gift in 1998, ostensibly to do with as I pleased, I'm not going to use those as references in my works either. But as a matter of moving past this mess, I'm going to make it clear that Greg Paul is now superfluous as far as referencing is concerned. I just don't want to be tangled up in his problems. Maybe the same isn't true from you point of view - that's just mine.

*I will post scans of GSP skeletals on this blog WHEN RELEVANT for purely educational purposes, as many science bloggers already do. Most of them are ones he gave me in person, but I'm not using these as reference. I can already draw my own full dinosaur scenes without references, thank you very much. Don't rip him off, but don't feel guilty about learning from his work either.

*I will NOT use them as primary or even secondary references for my skeletals, regardless of how the finished product ends up looking. I don't need tertiary references.

*I will not cave in and adopt a different pose. The pose is not GSP's property, and I already draw my dinosaurs facing the other way, with SHADED speculative bones, that's as far as I'm willing to go aside from adding my own logo to my skeletals (which I will do in the future).

*I will expose his current errors at every turn. They are there, and you do deserve to know WHAT they are before you go ahead with using Greg Paul's often over-simplified and stylized skeletals for reference.

You want source material for your drawings? Ask for papers on the DML or email any of the PhD's you are fans of. They're overall very nice people and won't bite your head off like Greg might. In fact, if I have what you're looking for (thanks to some very generous people I have a pretty good sized cache of dinosaur papers), I can email you the paper you want too. Then you can have ORIGINAL published reference figures that are not privatized or "trade secreted", and you no longer need Greg Paul's (sometimes erroneous) skeletals. And you won't be charged money for any of it!

Which brings us to the meaty point. Look here, Greg Paul's methodology has become one that suppresses the free flow of scientific information in the form of visual schematics of dinosaur anatomy. He's suppressing it by default because nobody's going to pay a fee for every species they need a skeletal reference for. Most artists are far from rich, they're struggling (ironically the same predicament Greg Paul is in, which led to his initial outburst of rage at being underbid and cheated). So they can't pay. And he doesn't have a wealthy duke as a patron. In the end this vast store of skeletal drawings becomes simply a form of forbidden occult knowledge like the formulas of medieval alchemists or the secret engineering methods of the master masons who built Europe's great cathedrals.

But they lived in a time when science was not freely accessible, and those with specialized skills guarded them jealously. They were paid by kings and nobility. There was no free access to information, no peer review, no scientific method. Any science that was known was tangled up in secret initiations and occult rites, and you had to pay a pretty high price to use it - and then, only through the medium of the trade-guilds or individuals that controlled this knowledge, who kept secret how they were able to do what they did. Discovering new methods of making strong alloys was simply a by-product of their search for the elixir of life, or the formula for making gold. And if the secret got out, the person who learned it could be arrested.

But wait.... that sounds oddly reminiscent of some things in Greg Paul's own portfolio. There are plenty of arcane inconsistencies whose symbolic meanings one can only guess at, and the ultimate reason for this is unknown. For example, his standards for illustrating a complete skeletal when much of the animal is not known. I'm talking skeletals with every bone drawn, nothing shaded to indicate it's speculative, but the real fossils are only a small fraction of the body. Why does he do that? How can we explain things like his Huabeisaurus? Only a handful of bones were listed in the description paper, yet there's a complete skeleton in the Princeton Field Guide. How about Pleurocoelus? That thing's far from complete, it's basically just fragments of juveniles, and yet we see a nearly complete skeletal from Greg Paul, with FOUR toe claws on each foot, no less! Yet other dinosaurs that are far more completely known (like Phuwiangosaurus and Isisaurus) are things he refuses to draw skeletals for, claiming that they're "too incomplete". Malawisaurus only got a skull pic from GSP, even though it's known from 90% of the skeleton, from at least 6 specimens!

So is the Circle completed? It the Great Work still uncapped and misunderstood? Is Greg Paul's sacred geometry only achieved by slashing up and re-arranging everything we thought we knew about holotypes and description papers, seemingly without rhyme or reason to the evidence? Does the alchemist simply lead us on a wild goose chase for consistent science, only to feed us a sometimes beautiful artifice that only mimics its appearance (or at least did back in 1995?) Are his constant changes to his mysteriously haunting schematics really anatomical updates, or simply a dark process of continual change to detect plagiarism and keep jealous demons banished and rival alchemists confused every few years? What are his methods for determining when to do a speculative full skeletal and when to leave parts blacked out? Is this some kind of hidden secret art, which one must be inducted into for years before becoming an Adept? I've heard some very conflicting figures and reasons for why he decides not to do skeletals for some very complete and taxonomically significant dinosaurs. Anyone who knows some details of what he at least claims are his standards is welcome to post it in the comments.

Assertio Sacrametorum ars Paleontographica! . . . . . . . . . . . . . His Pauliness Speaks out!

2011-04-11T19:30:00.000-07:00

April 11, 202 A.D. (After Darwin)

The Vatican, ROME* - Today His Pauliness, Pope Gregory Paul I, expressed dismay that his recent inspired addresses to the world regarding the consistency and autocracy of paleo-art have been taken out of context and misconstrued, in his words, to be an instrument of stifling the progress of art and science.

In a newly sealed and distributed Papal Encyclical signed immediately following Sunday's Tridentine Mass, the traditional form of the liturgy re-popularized by Benedict XVI, the pontiff made no bones about the steps that have become necessary for him to take in the regulation and enforcement of standards of the Pauly See's standards of paleoartistic supremacy in all matters black-and-white. Called "Assertio Sacrametorum ars Paleontographica", the encyclical laid bare for all Faithful to see the extreme hazards of not abiding by the conventions enacting the hegemony of the Paulian papacy in the rigid standards of originality in paleo-art. Anyone caught producing similar skeletal diagrams to His Pauliness, even in ecumenical matters as seemingly simple as pose, is to be excommunicated and his works seized or burned at the pontiff's displeasure. All those attempting to sell such work without having first purchased the necessary Papal indulgence, are sentenced to immediate burning at the stake. Those making rival interpretations of the Fossil Word completely from scratch were denounced as vain pagan revisionists and advised by the Holy Office on Sunday to "just give up".

"...When will you fools learn?"

"This is an extremely pressing matter," stated the Pope, the first American to be elected to the office and at 56 the youngest pontiff since Benedict IX in 1032 (777 Before Darwin), who was infamous for having served three non-consecutive reigns as Pope, and for selling the Papacy itself. "Not since the days of Luther, nay, of the Pornocracy itself, have we faced such besmirching festering threats to the Divine Order and righteous light of Archosaurian Truth!" Gregory Paul I reassured the public that this confusing state of affairs would not repeat itself: "We are in need of a guiding light to make sure that the future of knowledge, in particular, my knowledge of extinct animals, does not become diluted or copied without permission by heretics and intellectual doppelgangers. It is my Pauliness's sincere wish that age not be used as an accusation against me; for though I am a youth by the modern standards of my Holy Office, I aim to abide by the strict parsimonious doctrines of the mother Church, and avoid the past cold-blooded, bestial, and simonious excesses of Benedict IX, as well as the seizure-inducing Palpatinic stares of his recent frightening namesake, that dratted German - and no, I do not mean Heinrich Mallison."

Come and get me!

When pressed for an explanation of his recent stern policy for dealing with competing visual interpretations of dinosaurology, the pontiff had this to say: "In the days of Michelangelo, artists were bound to serve the Church as de facto servants of the Lord's glory. In fact, whether there be a Lord or not, the Church still set the text and regulated certain standards of accuracy and in the end it all became property of the Church and could not be reproduced without Church permission using any of the basal technologies available then. WE approved the science and poses, the artists followed. And relied on Our patronage. But now, with heretics of every hue, not just one or two but entire armies of them running amok in this secular globalist world of scanners and digital programs, our supreme authority over Paleotheology is under dire threat! These modern-day Luthers and Calvins, cursed blasphemers like Raul Martinvs and Fabivs Pastorivs, are threatening the financial stability (and thus ability to pray for the faithful) of My Pauliness and Darwin's True Church worldwide, and worse yet, loud-mouthed apostates like the notorious ex-novice Zacharias Armstrong, and independent hi-fi infidel freewheelers like that imperious Persian Nima Sassani, alias "Rex Palaeos", have been undermining the supremacy of the heavenly light of the Word of Paul everywhere from Brisbane to Isfahan, and what's more, making their rival creeds and depictions freely available on the internet without confession! Not that Our Pauliness ever had much of a presence in Isfahan, but still, one can dream, no?"

(....don't count on it.)

Pope Gregory Paul's longtime representative and part-time horned nemesis, Cardinal Per Christiansen, vice-vicar of St. John Lateral, commented thus on the current state of affairs: "For many years his Pauliness has been content to let his divinely informed representations of dinosaurs and other extinct life-forms be the gold standard for the entire sphere of paleo-illustration without calling fraudulent practices into question. However with an increasing number of corporations and projects turning away from the Pauly Truth of the pontiff to embrace cheap and readily available alternative faiths and their top artists, he has decided to lay down the LAW. Those besides the pontiff have no right to pontificate - about things they do not know, and even things they do know, for whatever they know about cnemial crests and Lateral running profiles, Rome has established that His Pauliness has known these things earlier, and better, and therefore has exclusive international copyright and claim to them by way of Divine Authority and unaccepted unaccredited PhDs."

Assertio Regnus Retroactivus (curriculum vitae manus predatorium pronatum circa 1989 CE)

Assertio Regnus Retroactivus (curriculum vitae cervicx cygniformus macronarens circa 1995)

In two accompanying and shorter documents, the Papal Bulls "Damnatio Paleontographica Extraneo Pontifex" and "Assertio Regnus Retroactivus Pontifex de morphus Cervix Cyngniformus Sauropodicum et Hadrosauricum et Manai Pronatatum Theropodicum", Gregory Paul I documented in bullet points the main abuses against his holy authority in the realm of scientific illustration. All current Gregory Paul skeletal poses, and in addition, all abrogated ones from previous years, are subject to postural exclusivity of his Pauliness. That means that to copy any body pose, or even any one of the classic though abrogated swan-necked macronarian poses or pronated hand theropod poses from the pontiff's output of the previous decade or before, is strictly forbidden just as is the outright reproduction of any of his work without first buying a writ of absolution for the sin.

It is rumored that as a result of all this, the price of an original papal masterpiece is now extremely high, as many rival artists can no longer afford the entirely reasonable absolution/indulgence fees and are leaving the paleo-art profession outright, the majority of them passing out on their couch at the end of the day bloodshot, shrouded in vodka fumes, and listening to endless playback loops of Enya interspersed with Kraftwerk. However by contrast, the situation at the Sauristine Chapel is said to be improving, with the Papal presses hard at work grinding out series after series of new indulgences for repentant formerly renegade artists seeking to reconcile with the Church and shed the shame of the heretical pasts. Famed illustrator and dissector of prehistoric corpses Scott Hartman set a precedent by making a solemn vow to change all the poses on his dinosaurs to avoid falling afoul of the pontiff's second Bull, the Assertio Regnus Retroactivus Pontifex. Other heretics still eking out their miserable living in the trade seem poised to capitulate likewise.

Which begs the question that has been on everyone's mind these days - is there going to be a revival of the Inquisition? Opinion is frantic and mixed. David James Marrs, maverick conspiracy expert and paraplegic ex-Paul plagiarizer of the last decade, claimed in a secret interview whose transcripts were obtained through legally gray means, that "there still is and always has been an Inquisition. The only difference is now they present One Eye and One Ring. Add the Roman cross in the center of that eye/ring and what do you get? Opus Dei. The modern Inquisition in disguise, waiting for their chance. I'm sure any free thinking person will see they have their fingers in something to do with it!" Others are more skeptical.

Rogue paleoartist Zacharias Armstrong, a wanted man with excommunication and the threat of inquisition hanging over his head, had this to say in an intercepted secret communique to his comrades in the underground:

"According to Pope Gregory Paul, you need to be able to "document" how you produced your restoration, then, in order to "prove originality". But the fact is that there are already so many people (even in his own circle) who use his skeletals as a devotional/inspirational guide, that in practice, he probably won't be able to torture or burn very many people. Also, the burden of proof is on him to prove the imitative heresy and/or apochryphal nature of the work.... So basically, as long as your outline or restoration doesn't look like it was simply traced from papal diagrams, you should be safe from the inquisition and its wrath. "

Others have taken a bolder stance still: Henricius 'Heinrich' Mallison, chief skeletal legate of Berlin, bluntly burned the papal threats and decrees in a huge bonfire outside Wittenberg and posted 95 stinging Dinosaur Mailing List responses to the papal bulls from the computer servers in the rectory of All Saints' Church. Within a few days, his objections had spread like wildfire across Deutschland and the entire blogosphere, and at the pope's orders he was summoned on Saturday by Luis XIX, Holy Gondwanan Emperor, to trek to Worms on foot and swallow said worms whole at the point of a spear. He angrily retorted: "So what? Now his Pauliness thinks he also has a monopoly on mastication?!?! I can do no other, Gott hilf mich!" In the shocked silence and disarray that gripped the guards as they attempted to digest his iconoclastic statement, Mallison fled the scene with live worms frantically crawling everywhere - even on the emperor's face. He has barely been heard from since.

Scott Hartman, widely regarded by reformists (as well as the British) as a much safer alternative to the Papal skeletal hegemony, has carefully worded his own address to the Pope during this very sensitive time:

"I suspect the utility of your pose as any sort of standard is now severely compromised, as most artists are controversy-averse and will acquiesce to your request. Since the use of that pose as canon is no longer tenable, I am willing to put in the (not insignificant) amount of work to alter mine as penance, out of deference to the work your Pauliness put in to benefit the field of skeletal reconstructions conceptually, and out of a sincere (thought not optimistic) hope that it will improve the financial situation the Papacy finds itself in.

That doesn't mean a standard pose would not be of use. But more importantly, I feel a similar level of courtesy needs to be extended by your Pauliness (and others) in these threads to those trying to contribute to the conversation. Yes, not all comments are equally useful, but it's important that all that have a stake in it participate. I'd also note that you and I don't have a perfectly overlapping notion of who is making valuable contributions. To be sure there have been several "instigating" sources of heresy, but at the least some people I know and respect have received undeserved abuse for participating in the discussion."

No word yet on the Vatican's response to this message.

It has been rumored by some flying pigs in Alaska that across the Atlantic, the legendary deceased American Paleo-artist Charles R. Knight has risen from the dead to proclaim Pope Gregory Paul as the true savior of paleontography, devouring a creationist in the process and disintegrating into dust upon hearing the mighty Word of Paul. So far the Vatican has yet to endorse or verify this miracle, though a team of priests has reportedly been sent to examine the remaining corporeal dust that allegedly was once Knight. Knight himself, though unlikely to be canonized, was ironically and rapidly awarded a posthumous, post-decompositus Papal Knighthood, the Holy Order of the Golden spur, a distinction awarded to Mozart, Casanova, and many other illustrious though only marginally Catholic figures whose outrageous talents in some area or other flat-out flabbergasted the other 99% of humanity.

At the end of his Easter homily, the Pope concluded the speech by exposing the danger behind giving even the softest platform or credence to criticism of his policies:

"It is a common tactic (often used by biased media reporters) of setting up a false argument by making a false and remarkably outlandish claim. I did not come close to saying that I should be the only one doing dinoskeletons. I would never do that. I said that it is a SIN for a paleoartist to miss building up their own distinctive brand by patterning their images after someone else’s. Yes, all homages are pure evil and all who do them should die! As for others' current dinosaur work I admit I am really biased towards my stuff. I am so not ashamed."

Finis expositus quod dixit pontifex megalomagnus supercilious.

* L'Osservatore Romano takes no credit or responsibilities for the content, authorship, or any potential distortions real or imagined arising from this article. This article is for humor and entertainment purposes only and not meant to offend. The statements of real people and people based on real people have been comically distorted for gag value only. If you are a hard-core Catholic or a Greg Paul admirer (never thought I'd say those two things in the same sentence, did you?), or one of the persons mentioned above, don't take any of this personally. Read the archived DML posts on the Greg Paul controversy (if you haven't already done so, then absolutely do it!) and then sit back and laugh a little at how the author dragged his feet for 10 days after April Fool's.

Is Paleo-Art Dead?!

2011-03-16T08:03:00.000-07:00

I've been keeping track of the great Paleo-art debate on the Dinosaur Mailing List for a while now. It's generating a lot of buzz, and even my original blog post is getting some attention (and outside of ArtEvolved at that!) yet there are some very disturbing issues that remain.

For those of you who have read my posts on SVP 2010 in Pittsburgh, you may remember that I asked Greg Paul for advice on how to be successful in the paleo-art business. His response at the time seemed dismissive and even a bit antisocial - but now I'm shocked at how honest and realistic he was being. He got into this thing decades ago, and in his words, "would have no idea how to make a name in it today" were he to start over.

I have now a sinking gut feeling that what he really meant, in so many words, is that he's stuck in this profession and can't get out even if he wanted to. And it was a warning - think really hard about how badly you want paleoart to be your career. You think I'm kidding? Read this comment of his on the DML: it actually is NOT draconian or megalomaniac, and it's actually quite a tearful dose of reality.

An unfortunate problem with these discussions is that persons who just do 
not know about the issue seem to be obsessed with making arguments that are 
so disconnected from reality that they are from a galaxy far, far away. This 
has been happening with some really silly notions on what and how 
paleoartists can earn. This is bad because then those in paleontology may have 
a major misimpression of what is going on with the paleoartists they often work 
with. 

Some fellow actually suggested that a certain noted artist might earn, say 
a quarter million on a single painting. Let me be clear about this. There is 
absolutely no significant adult market for original paleo paintings in 
existence. There was one briefly after the first JP came out in Japan and some 
artists earned modest amounts, but then their economy went belly up. 
Lazendorf, a famed hair dresser with top level clientele packed his high rise 
apartment to the gills for a few years, and then sold it off for a lot of money 
and switched I hear to Asian art. 

There are a number of fellow paleo nerds who would love to have Hallett, 
Gurchie or Paul on their walls. And they can only afford posters. Considering 
the time etc involved it does not make sense to sell an original color of 
say 3x4 ft for less than some thousands of dollars. I have a website and I am 
easy to contact and have not sold an original to a private collector for 
years. As far as I know much the same applies to other paleoartists. Many a 
time I have been asked if I sell originals and when I tell them how much they 
are unable to proceed (also, because I modify old work a lot selling it off 
is not the best). 

A quarter million for a dinosaur painting, come on.  And I wish. 

Now, maybe setting up a paleoartist site that includes a venue for 
promoting original art will improve matters. One can doubt that it will, but it 
it might work and is worth a try. Even if it does it will take years to build up 
clientele and no one will get rich that way.  

Books. Back when I did PDW, repped by top NY agent Brockman to a top NY 
publisher, it was the last few years that that was possible. The only adult 
dino books a major publisher will even come close to considering these days is 
a narrative tradebook, and the publishers actually require that it include 
minimal illustrations to keep down production costs and because they fear 
they turn off readers. If you do not believe this then you contact the 
tradebook agents and see what they tell you. I know the business. In general 
only university presses pick up those kinds of books these days and they

cannot pay useful advances and sales are so limited that they are in effect

vanity books. 

But what about kidsbooks? I and others have approached a number of juvenile 
book publishers and agents and no takers. (Maybe you noticed I have not 
done kidsbooks, that's why). Am not entirely sure why this is, probably has to 
do with publishers keeping costs down by using derivative art that basically 
rips some of us off. I was once on the verge of a big deal but the 
publisher at that moment decided to concentrate on fiction works due to changing 
market forces. 

Kids products and other licensing. A couple of agents repped my work and 
got nowhere. Again producers prefer to keep their costs down rather than pay 
significant up front fees or royalties. 

I have been told by product representatives that art derivative of mine 
seriously impairs my ability to get work, and that I need to do something about 
it. Which I am doing. 

Exhibits. This remains an important source of income. But musuem and 
science center exhibits managers chronically plead poverty (because they 
overdesign their exhibits relative to their budgets) and drive down payments to 
below acceptable levels. Because there are so many paleoartists willing to work 
for peanuts many are taking advantage of this situation. Also, there just are 
not that many paleoexhibits in production at a given time. 

Dino docs. Because cable programming is marginally funded the producers 
always plead poverty. Because of under cost competition -- some derivative of 
my work, some not -- I don't get that sort of work these days. 

How about selling stuff on the web? Ha, ha, ha, ha. That's one of the great 
jokes of the digital era. 

Someone was going on about how some paleoartists can charge lower prices 
because they are "more efficient." What a disconnect from reality and plain 
common sense. Doing dinosaur art is not following Moore's Law. Using copiers 
to quickly resize elements does help a little. But doing ORIGINAL dinosaur 
restorations is ALWAYS a long, tedious process that takes lots and lots of 
research including digging through often old and hard to get publications and 
travel. Using computers for rendering basic skeletons does not seem to save 
time (and I seem to catch more errors when using old analog methods, and the 
computer produced skeletons out there seem prone to low levesl of fidelity). 
I am as efficient as anyone when it comes to doing real paleoart. The one 
way to seem to become more efficient in this specialty is to be derivative 
rather than original, and basically use the published work of others to gain 
an edge on those very artists. 

And someone was giving us paleoartists wise and sage advice about how 
perhaps we should understand that because there is so much competition (much of 
which is derivative) that we should accept it being mere part time work that 
we do on the side. Aside from making us into mere amateurs, if I did that 
then I could not have produced all those nice skeletal restorations so many 
seem to really like (and in some cases use for their paleoart that then 
competes with mines). 

Think about. Really, think it through. 

To be blunt about it, if you are considering getting into paleoart, think 
about it twice, three, times and then four. The paleomarket will always be 
too small to sustain a large number of artists. Even so, I do think that the 
situation can be significantly improved if certain steps are taken.  

These discussions on these lists, although far more extensive than I 
thought they would be and perhaps tedious to those not involved in the issue 
(rather tedious to me for that matter), are very important to the field of vert 
paleo, and should have occurred long ago -- I have perhaps been tardy in 
waiting to bring up these issues. But one reason the discussion is longer -- 
and more vehment -- than it perhaps needs to be is because some who are not 
familiar with the paleoart facts continue to feel obliged to lecture us 
paleoartists, sometimes harshly -- about what we should to. Don't do that. And 
if you are going to debate me remember that I have long had contacts with top 
agents, attorneys etc, and of course I have little patience for tendentious 
arguments from those who lack sufficient knowledge to dispute the facts that I 
lay out. Treat me and others who have been in the bizz awhile with some  
respect. 

And never tell me, "but Greg, your work is so good, surely there is big 
demand for it if you just get the right agent" or so forth. Have heard that one 
before. 

G Paul

This was one of those crash and burn moments. Or at least it looked that way. One of those "Coyote chasing roadrunner realizes he's just walked off a cliff onto thin air" moments. I though to myself.... certainly Greg Paul's statements can't be true, can they? Paleo-art has no potential whatsoever for large profits? Do other artists agree? Is Greg Paul's situation unique to Greg Paul, or do other veterans of paleo-art have a similar testimony? Why have they not spoken up?

But if you thought this was just a negative complaining rant by an artist who's a victim of both the bad economy and his own success, you're wrong. There IS a strong basis to his arguments in this post. Other artists have had pretty much the same frustrations.

Tess Kissinger, whom I greatly respect as an experienced insider of the field, responded to Greg's comment with essentially perfect agreement:

What Greg says about the market is essentially true. I appraised the Lanzendorf collection. The average price for a large painting was $1000 - $5000.

Without collectors there is no chance of moving that average up.

Maybe the "bottom line" about paleoart is that, as a full time job, as a field, it does not support a lower middleclass existence. Artists are notoriously capable of living on little - we don't require new cars, fancy homes, plasma screens - but paleoart is still a precarious way to make a living.

Is there any way to change this?  I don't know.

The field gets better than it pays for.

Tess

If Greg Paul's demands about not using his poses and so forth sound desperate, that's probably because they are. The man's struggling to eke out an existence and literally is going unappreciated by most people who think they have taste in art. Now obviously making money in any art field is difficult. There is always more supply than demand. There are so many artists of every sort that nobody's heard of before. Even just looking at DeviantArt, the number of professional portrait painters, photographers, etc. is beyond belief. The situation is even worse in paleo-art, where a private art market is virtually non-existence. You cannot simply build a business empire on the back of Lanzendorf. So what's left is doing art for books. And and even with good agents, publishing your art is an uphill struggle.

Not only that, but it seems like book publishers are actually dictating what the style of the paintings should be, as if they know dinosaurs better than the artists! And they pay them barely liveable wages. It's a catch-22. Maybe there would be a bigger market for dinosaur art, at least in book form, if publishers actually allowed good art onto their pages! Artist Luis Rey had this to say:

...what I see these days is not Greg Paul inspiration. It is a bunch of professional artists (and many not that good even as professionals) that continue to be hired to do monstrosities and anatomy-nil dinosaurs. The main trends seem to be: a) To be very "realistic" (photoshop skin or effects over rubbish anatomical reconstructions is and will always be: realistic garbage... Darren Naish and myself know a lot about this). b) Over use of dramatic Jurassic Fight Club rubbish... if that in itself is painful to watch...just imagine that without the anatomical knowledge! c) Multicoloured clowns pretending to be dinosaurs (lamentably -most probably- inspired by yours truly... mea culpa).

...And yes, you've guessed it: not a single dinosaur I have seen for years in these plethora of Jurassic Park rip-offs (and worst) have been really inspired by Greg Paul's anatomy master classes... lots of Jurassic Park half-digested rubbish, but not a lot more (Or wait! It may be that some of the JP reconstructions were in their time also inspired by Greg Paul...!) >These< are the people to whom MOST if not "all" the jobs go to. And these people most probably never have considered themselves "paleoartists", paleontologists or anatomists either... they are just opportunists feeding on a trend.

It makes you just wish they at least had copied Greg Paul or simply have learned from his anatomical lessons... this thread also makes you wary of the concept of "tribute" or "homage"(like Ralph Chapman was saying)... or even parody or interpretation... a homage to your favourite inspiration could cost you an arm and a leg in the near future!

So what is the use then for a "statement from paleoartists" when the jobs will keep going to whoever the publishing houses want (or can afford)? Publishing companies (with the honourable exception) most of the time want malleable and docile artists that will do whatever they have in mind or else... that means you don't get the job... I have lost jobs because i refused to do Deinonychus without feathers... or "John Sibbicks"!

So based on what the pros have said, publishers want no-name artists without a distinctive style who will just copy whatever the executives think looks good. It's a crisis disturbingly similar to what Frank Zappa described regarding the music industry (warning - not for the easily offended) - sometimes, an old boring cigar-chomping executive who can admit that he doesn't know beans about a new product, but is willing to take an initial risk on new ideas like a real entrepeneur (hell if I know what it is, lets make a few thousand copies and see if it sells!) is the best thing for an industry - but sadly, we don't see that anymore.

Now publishers are crowded with self-righteous yuppies who are convinced they know what's best for you and me in the bookstore - they normally make meager marginal profits off of such crappy dinosaur books that you'd literally be better off buying used dinosaur books from 30 years ago, which for all their cold-blooded flaws were actually more accurate and more artistic than 90% of the digitally repackaged trash on the market today. Is it any surprise why publishers complain they are "chronically low on money" and have to hire the lowest bidder? The person in the executive chair can not dictate the taste of an entire population. When they think they have the right to do this, what they put out is often absolute garbage, and real artists go out of business. All these self-proclaimed experts of the corporate world who seem to think they know everything, as actually ruining and dumbing down the market to the point that good art/music/etc. becomes a foreign entity to the consumer. If you produce high-quality original work with some real effort and creativity, you won't get jobs. Or you will lose a lot more than you get. And then members of the general public who do know of people like Greg Paul will preach: "but you're so good, there must be millions of people lining up to buy your art, if only you could market this or that differently..." without knowing that these millions of people (apparently) don't exist because publishers essentially marketed them out of existence with a flood of bad books with dumbed-down wrong information and bad pictures, so that well-to-do connoisseurs of art assume that dinosaur art has no worth and just ignore it altogether.

And Greg Paul has a very nice website with professional flash animations, it's easy to find and very well-designed, easy on the eyes, shows his best work for all to see - yet still no private clients? We're long past the days of the Medicis, where artists were few in number and worked in guilds and schools, almost as a secret society of sorts, and were hooked up by their masters and well-paid by the wealthy, rather than scrounging for every potential crumb - and so imitating a master's style was respected, not reviled, and quality was increased over the years rather than diluted. Now "artists" are a dime a dozen, and nobody gives a hoot if you're a master with 20 years experience or just a thoughtless imitator without understanding and knowledge.

So here's this thing - what are your thoughts on this issue? In this age of affordable art classes, large numbers of artists, and free exchange of information on the internet, is paleo-art dead?

Is there potentially a bigger market for high-quality stuff that artists are just not reaching? And are book publishers just idiots for offering a pittance and even dictating what the art should look like (i.e. crappy Jurassic Park and Land before Time ripoffs redone with digital skin)? Would they sell more books if they took a chance on better artists who actually know what the heck they're doing (and therefore justify paying them what they truly deserve?) Can a bigger market actually be created (or reached, if it exists?) Is there a more efficient way of marketing art that nobody in paleo-art has tried? Ebooks? Kindle/nook? Communal online galleries? Online royalty licensing of images via Paypal or credit card? Any constructive ideas and thoughts are welcome.

Greg Paul threatens legal smackdown!

2011-03-12T00:42:00.000-08:00

Ok for those of you dino fans who haven't been keeping track of the Dinosaur Mailing List (and I don't blame you, because it's a pretty bland and downright primitive operation by modern internet standards) there has been some major chatter regarding the use of world-renowned paleoartist Greg Paul's work.

Some people have been stealing his work. And making money off of their plagiarism - not just that, they are undercutting Greg by willing to charge far less to museum curators, exhibit planners, publishing companies, etc. I'm not talking about simply making art that looks like his style or level of detail - I mean they're literally tracing, copying, and simply recoloring EXACT IDENTICAL replicas of his work. And he's suing.

Now ordinarily you might say "big deal. He should go ahead and sue their pants off". And rightfully so - stealing and devaluing work like that is one of the biggest problems in any commercial art industry and it needs to be dealt with. But it's not quite as simple as all that. He's gone far further - now he's basically threatening to sue artists for a far more draconian range of "offenses", even things as minor as how the legs and feet are posed. This goes beyond defense of intellectual property - I think this approach is vigilante and excessive.

Now I don't want to misrepresent what he's saying, so here are his actual statements on different areas of the problem, with context:

SKELETALS:

"The basic rule needs to be that that an artist produce their own skeletal 
restoration based on original research. This would include using photos of 
the skeleton, or an illustrated technical paper on the particular taxon. This 
then goes into your files as documentation of originality, and you can 
publish it. 

Do not pose it in my classic left foot pushing off in a high velocity 
posture. Not because I am inherently outraged -- it would be rather nice if not 
for some practical issues. For one thing I have succeeded in getting some big 
payments for unauthorized use of this pose by major prjects that should 
have known better. Aside from the financial issue, there are other concerns if 
you think about it. It is widely assumed that any skeleton in this pose is 
mine, but what if it does not meet my level of accuracy? The trust in and 
value of my work is degraded. There are gigillions of poses a skeleton can be 
placed in. Be original.  

Lots of original skeletal restorations do not look much like mine -- I 
suspect because they are not necessarily as accurate. If someone's original 
skeletal restoration is close to mine that is OK as long as they have the 
documentation of originality....

You apparently either have to have extensive documentation for each image (try proving what your sources were in a court of law, where attorneys have to go by their eyes and know nothing of the positions of zygapophyses on a skeletal), or make inaccurate skeletals or run the risk of being branded a "Greg Paul clone" and getting sued. Which is truly a sad proposition because it means that by going after merely similar poses rather than blatant intellectual property fraud, more and more legitimate paleo-artists will feel uneasy about staying in the profession. If nobody but Greg Paul is making accurate skeletals, there's nobody else to use as a technical reference for complex paintings. And then you either have to pay up for the privilege or just get out of the profession altogether. This isn't going to stop those who intentionally copy and underbid Greg Paul from continuing to do so. Thieves who copy Greg wholesale aren't going to be deterred by a draconian blanket risk of a fine for any slight semblance to his work if they think they can get away with far worse (and have already done so). Law-abiding artists however will be intimidated and discouraged by such blunt and imprecise punishment tactics because they don't want their finances and reputation ruined. They actually do care.

"...Perhaps you are thinking that it sounds like a whole lot of work to have to 
go to the trouble to do original skeletal restorations for all these 
dinosaurs, all the more so when a set of excellent skeletal restorations is 
already available. 

Exactly. That is the whole point."

We now need files to make sure we can defend our work in case we get sued? Isn't that a bit far to go? I personally have lots of papers on file and photographs too, so when I draw bones for a restoration it's from the original research and actual photographs, not Greg Paul's products. But not everyone has access to these - and not everyone can tell the difference at a glance between well-researched skeletals by two different artists. Of course I try to document my own research on this blog; I've always tried to avoid relying on anyone's previous skeletals as references (including Greg Paul's) and I was fortunate enough to have friends who hooked me up with huge numbers of rare source papers on dinosaurs that have been enormously helpful in my research, but the potential that anyone can get sued if their work merely looks like something Greg Paul could have done is frightening. In other words, give up, NOW.

Furthermore, his warning not to do a skeletal in the pose he uses (left foot pushing off) comes across as nothing short of megalomania. The precedent of his having sued the people behind "major projects that should have known better" is hardly a "practical issue". It's putting the cart before the horse. So now because he sued one person who used a similar pose (but possibly for a totally original skeletal OR a plagiarism - Greg's a bit vague on that point) then nobody can pose their original skeletals that way? The details of that case are not even known to us!

You can copyright an image, but you can't copyright a pose. Who knows, just as with the whole idea of black and white skeletal drawings, Greg Paul may not even be the first person to use such a pose. It makes no sense to copyright a pose for a skeletal of all things, since they are all in profile and most are not necessarily unique "life" poses. On the other hand, if we're talking about a drawing or painting of a live scene in action (i.e. perspective poses, not bland profiles) then if your poses look like those of a specific Greg Paul painting you are in the wrong and can be sued since for a live scene you have to replicate both the pose and the angle to make it have the same "pose" as a Greg Paul work.

For example you could draw a T. rex in the same pose as the his famous T. rex pair painting (running, with head turned right), but draw it from a completely different angle, and with different patterns, color, texture, etc. There is no grounds to sue for this, because from a different angle there is no spatial resemblance to the Greg Paul painting. There are only so many anatomically accurate poses a T. rex could be in. There aren't "gigillions" of poses for a skeletal either, and the fact that a skeletal is usually in profile limits the number of angles to just one for primary profile skeletals. There are only so many ways you can pose a profile skeletal and still have it be accurate. Theropods need that s-curve in their necks, brachiosaurs need vertical necks, diplodocids roughly horizontal, tyrannosaur arms have to be supinated (facing inwards), and walking/running poses (and even tail poses) are limited by the biomechanics of the animal. Even if you try to make the pose different from a Greg Paul pose, it will probably still bear some similarity if you want the thing to be accurate! Unless you make it a snapshot "action" pose like Jaime Headden and some other artists are known to do, but that just makes it more tedious to illustrate. There aren't gazillions of ways to restore a dinosaur, especially not in terms of posing a skeletal profile. Indeed Greg Paul himself said something remarkably similar in his 1991 paper on dinosaur myths:

Myth: At the end of a heated discussion, often I have heard the retort, "well, there is
more than one way to restore a dinosaur!"

Reality: A dubious statement at best, it is becoming less and less true as we learn more and more about the actual appearance of dinosaurs. After all, each taxa had a particular form and appearance in life, and in many cases we know what this form was (Paul, 1987a). Hadrosaurs have down curved rather than straight anterior dorsal columns, soft dorsal frills are often preserved, and their skin is well documented. The knees of giant theropods, ornithopods, and ceratopsids articulated correctly only when they were flexed like those of birds, they did not have the straight knees of elephants (Paul, 1987a). Of course, there are many other things we do not know, and many areas remain open to dispute. Even so, I have noticed that the above statement is usually voiced when the speaker has run out of specific arguments for their case. So it contains little useful information, and it encourages the anything goes attitude that long plagued the field of paleorestoration.

Either you're an anything goes proponent of dubious ways of looking at dinosaur anatomy, or you're potentially an intellectual property thief.... seems to be what his statements add up to. Which smells like total hypocrisy in my book. The fact is, as long as you do your own research, it shouldn't matter what pose you use, there are only so many accurate or plausible ones. And there is no single Greg Paul pose for any one dinosaur. He's revised all of his skeletals, changed things like arm poses, neck poses, etc. So now are all his current and former neck and arm poses off limits for illustrators? Even if every bone in another artist's skeletal skeletal is the original illustration of that artist? Should every artist then come up with a trademark pose, that no other artist in the future can ever use? There would quickly be no realistic poses left!

HOW SHOULD YOU DO THEM?

"So the choices are these -- 

Do your own researched and produced skeletal restorations in an original 
pose. If some of these turn out it is very similar to mine that's OK as long 
as the documentation exists. 

Do not do your own skeletal restorations, but do not copy my art either (i. 
e. stay away from the Greg Paul look). There are some current artists who 
do this and they are not violating my copyrights. I of course prefer to think 
such work is not as accurate as mine but what do I know."

That better be a typo. Do do your own skeletals but don't do them, and don't copy mine either? That's a catch-22 if I ever heard one. Greg Paul's not the only person who can do skeletals. But of course if you're not Greg Paul, don't even try to do your own skeletals, because even if you're being original and not cheating, you're still never going to be as accurate so might as well give up now!

Don't get me wrong, I'm actually in Greg's corner for most of this issue, but even though he's probably done more skeletals than anyone, claiming a monopoly over the right to produce skeletals for commercial work is no more ethical than stealing someone else's skeletals and passing them off as your own. So I hope that really is a typo.

However this does not mean that skeletals should all be open-source. Some artists do make them open-source, while others simply cannot afford to. Greg Paul makes a living off of art, so for him this is not a viable option. I'm all for seeing less experienced artists who do not have a good working knowledge of dinosaur anatomy (and hence can't make their own skeletals) paying for the right to use Greg Paul's skeletals as resources for their commercial work. He deserves the money. However, to make something as unavoidably ubiquitous as certain skeletal poses "closed-source" runs the risk of successively making it impossible for any artist to avoid getting sued because there is a limit to how many ways you can accurately pose any one dinosaur in a profile skeletal. As years and decades pass, and more unique poses get "claimed" as trademarks by various new artists, it will become exponentially harder to find your own and still remain accurate. If you make a simple pose a copyright violation, then everyone will be a criminal at some point - perhaps in less than a hundred or even fifty years - unless you want to get really crazy and put your skeletals in all sorts of crazy barely believable dislocated poses. And even after a while of new artists doing that, it would get even harder to be fully "original" in posing. As they age and die, who will their copyrights pass to? Family or some big corporate trust? When the copyrights expire will it be legal to once again use accurate poses? Or will the profession become to choked by litigation that it will die and publishers in the next century will simply have to continue using old licensed illustrations by long-gone artists? Shouldn't the content matter more than the pose? This brave new world of trademarked poses looks like nothing so much as a key to a Pandora's Box of insanity.

ANOTHER PERSPECTIVE:

Scott Hartman, whose skeletal drawings have a roughly similar pose to Greg Paul's, has offered to change the poses on all of them, though since there are over a hundred, this may take a very long time. He claims that Greg was very gracious and did not threaten any litigation, but that his warnings are more like "best practices". While he's totally right on this, I don't know how reasonable it is to go change everything for reasons that have nothing to do with updated research, especially when this might make the skeletals less accurate.

Here's Scott's response:

Greg Paul's posts have garnered a polarized array of responses.  I
don't really want to add to the cacophony of people addressing
specific legal claims, but regarding the issue of skeletal poses I'd
note that Greg did not seem (to me) to be making a copyright/trademark
claim as much as a statement on "best practices" based on his
practical concerns about branding and such.  Note that it came in a
section of his post that was aimed at artists who potentially want to
do their own reconstructions.

Allowing Greg to establish a branding around the poses he popularized
is a request I'm inclined to grant; after corresponding briefly with
Greg I've decided to embark on the process of reposing my 100+
skeletal reconstructions.

I want to be clear: Greg did not contact me about changing my
skeletals, nor was he anything but gracious in the discussion.  I'm
not doing this out of fear of litigation.  I've been asked innumerable
times by others why I haven't adopted my "own" pose so I'm simply
using this as a final impetus to do so.

Like Mike Taylor, I lament that the situation has reached the point
where commercial concerns outweigh the scientific utility of posing
animals consistently.  I had earnestly hoped that by adopting the same
pose that I would be helping to "standardize" this aspect of skeletal
reconstructions to better facilitate comparison.

So there you have it. I don't agree on the posing issue; suing for a skeletal pose seems pointless and unfair if the actual bones are drawn differently and the result of original research (like that of Scott Hartman). However changing the poses was Scott's personal choice based on many reasons that mostly had nothing to do with Greg Paul, and I can respect that. The tricky thing about the point Scott brings up is whether artists should even have a "signature pose" or not. Theoretically, not all artists would even want any part of this world of everyone having their own copyrighted pose - this could eventually lead to successive closure or exclusivization of poses through copyright attrition. If we all have to avoid using "popular" or previously used poses like the plague, two problems pop up: 1) it's harder to compare skeletals of the same species by two different artists; 2) everyone's going to be in a heightened state of paranoia about avoiding looking too much like another artist's skeletals while simultaneously trying to remain accurate. There are only so many ways you can interpret accurate poses in profile without inadvertently "imitating" somebody else, and as time goes on the number of options will get exponentially smaller and more miserable. Of course directly copying others' work is flat-out wrong and can also unintentionally lead to replicating their mistakes and causing widespread inaccuracies in the field (something else that Greg touches on in his posts to the DML, and was also sadly common for many years with people ripping off the outdated paintings of Knight and Burian). But a simple profile pose isn't going to lead to those same errors, nor does it in any way imply a wholesale ripoff. The question is where do you draw the line? At what point can a mere pose be considered a "brand" or a trademark? Can it?

What's your perspective on this? Feel free to post comments below. Here, here, and here are Greg Paul's original posts on the DML for reference. P.S. I plan to cover the problem of paleoart fraud in later posts. So don't forget to remind me :)

New, strange, and HUGE titanosaurs!

2011-02-16T04:36:00.000-08:00

While everyone's busy preparing for Europasaurus month and the International dinosaur illustration contest in Spain, here's a heads up on some new titanosaur discoveries.

Traukutitan - a new midsize to large titanosaur, probably a Lognkosaur. Read the paper HERE.

It's not breaking any size records, but still, that is one seriously big femur. And gorgeous too, the thing's almost perfectly preserved.

Tapuiasaurus - a rather small titanosaur from Brazil, tapuiasaurus is the oldest known member of nemegtosauridae, dating all the way back to the Albian epoch of the Early Cretaceous. That's a pretty big deal, because up until now it was believed nemegtosaurs only emerged at the end of the Late Cretaceous. Since nemegtosaurs are pretty much the most advanced titanosaur family known, that means all the other more primitive families are probably even OLDER than the Albian (and most of them are only known from Late Cretaceous species too!) This amazing specimen has a complete skull and hyoid (throat) bones, not to mention explaining the whole crazy defiance-of-continental-drift problem previously present in the nemegtosaurid fossil record. Interestingly, the skull is "bleached white", much like remains of its Mongolian relatives... probably has to do with the sediment mineral content. Read the paper HERE.

Lastly, there's a huge new specimen of a titanosaur that's been known for a long time - Alamosaurus. This sole sauropod of the North American Maastrichtian age is known from several juvenile and adolescent specimens of different ages and sizes, and it was long thought that the adults were around 50 ft. long.... until a specimen popped up a few years ago that was more like 80 ft. long. So that must be the full grown adult? NO. Now there's a specimen whose neck vertebrae were apparently just as big as those of Puertasaurus. Which means - yeah, we're looking at an Alamosaurus that topped 100 feet. Easily the biggest titanosaur of the northern hemisphere. And one of the three or four biggest dinosaurs of all time, by the looks of it. Read the paper HERE.

Here's a scale diagram of the Alamosaurus neck fragment on top, and the 9th neck vertebra of Puertasaurus below. At right is a femur from a smaller (though still gigantic) individual of Alamosaurus. Is the new giant specimen finally an adult? I'd think so, but wait until the next one turns up!

And on an unrelated note, there are rumors that a new planet may have been found in the deep reaches of the solar system. And it's downright huge. All you 2012 conspiracy buffs probably don't need to hold your breath though. It will take two years to sift through the data, which may or may not prove the existence of this theoretical "Planet X". And it's not going to be anywhere near us next year, assuming it exists. We're talking about an orbit 15,000 times farther from the sun than we are, for a planet that's too far away to see or even be lit by the sun, at least in visible wavelengths. Still, finding a new planet out there would rock, no question.

FORGOTTEN GIANTS, #2: Argentinosaurus

2011-02-05T12:16:00.000-08:00

It has been a LONG time, dino-fans. But after SVP 2010, its aftermath, writing and working on tons of other projects, I thought I'd show you all something that's already been making the rounds on DeviantArt.

My second installment of the Forgotten Giants series, Argentinosaurus!

Argentinosaurus huinculensis is widely considered to be the biggest dinosaur. Though Amphicoelias fragillimus would have been far larger, and even today, Puertasaurus is the biggest dinosaur known from currently existing remains, that still doesn't reduce the fact that Argentinosaurus still holds many records.

* The largest femur currently known
* The tallest dorsal vertebrae currently known
* The longest tibia currently known (no, Bruhathkayosaurus doesn't count. Here's why.)
* Possibly the largest sacrum ever discovered
* The largest replica/speculatively sculpted fiberglass skeleton mount anywhere (there's one copy in the Fernbank Museum, another in Germany's Senckenberg Museum, and another at Museo Carmen Funes in Plaza Huincul, near the site of the dinosaur's discovery).
* The longest dorsal column of any titanosaur
* The largest (and possibly only) dinosaur to have a museum built on-site specifically to house its remains
* The biggest dinosaur named for a country

So it's almost a forgone conclusion that this giant would be #2 in my series. It's not really "forgotten" at all, but it's still a very important member of the titanosauria, and still not very well-understood. The remains uncovered and described by Dr. Jose Bonaparte and Dr. Rodolfo Coria are pretty limited, but the size of them is astounding. Vertebrae over a meter tall. A femur 8 feet long. And hips as wide a car.

Within a few years it had become an international sensation. Finally, Ultrasauros was out and Argentinosaurus was the new biggest dinosaur. By the late 90s, its name was well known, and it became the subject of a number of long-forgotten TV specials with badass music but dismally high narrator turnover rates.

Ahh yes, the 90s. Good times...

Argentinosaurus is today still famous as the "biggest dinosaur" despite Supersaurus being longer, Sauroposeidon being taller, and the legendary Amphicoelias fragillimus being far longer and far heavier. Even since 2005, when the even more massive Puertasaurus was discovered, Argentinosaurus is still the iconic "record holder" in the eyes of the public. So even though it's pretty popular and far from forgotten, it's still a very important titanosaur, so you knew I was going to give it the Paleo-King treatment sooner or later!

However, there was a bit of a challenge - though huge, the known bones of Argentinosaurus comprise only a small portion of the skeleton. Several dorsal vertebrae, a tibia, a referred femur shaft, a partial sacrum, parts of the ilia and a fragment of pubis. There's also a second referred femur which may be from Argentinosaurus but I've never seen it figured.

This scarcity of fossil remains hasn't stopped people from trying to fill in the huge gaps. The Fernbank Museum's Argentinosaurus mount in Atlanta, Georgia, which is made of mostly speculative fiberglass models along with a few casts of the original bones, is one such attempt. But it's got a host of mistakes in the speculative parts.

Fernbank Museum mount

Senckenberg Museum mount (Frankfurt, Germany)

Museo Carmen Funes mount (Plaza Huincul, Argentina)

These three mounts are all identical, and even have similar poses, but are photographed from different angles. See if you can find the following errors in them (there may be even more that I didn't catch):

* Abnormally angular nasal arch
* Lower jaw looks strangely too much like that of Giganotosaurus - huge side hole and all!
* Teeth are far too few and thin, appear to be made of wire
* Neck is too horizontal (probably a result of the designers and welders reading too much Kent Stevens...)
* Most neck vertebrae are just clones/recasts of one another; three in a row identical, then the next three...
* Cervical ribs are drooping down at the ends instead of overlapping snugly in double rows along the base of the neck.
* Ribs are excessively deep in the chest region to shorten far too rapidly as you go back to the hips - a 'triangular pan-pipe' rib cage profile not seen in any sauropods.
* Ilia are curved inward toward the backbone at their front tips, big mistake! In titanosaurs (and all macronarians for that matter) they are curved OUT. Titanosaurs had a wide belly, flared-out hips make sense. For that matter, the rib cage is also a bit too narrow!
* Sacrum is missing large portions of the front two sacral ribs (the original fossil was missing them too -why didn't the preparators account for this and reconstruct the missing portions?)
* Sacrum is not fused to the ilia - in fact there are huge gaps separating it from them. The reason for these garish gaps can only be guessed at.
* The radius and ulna are improperly aligned in both arms. They should be one in front of the other, not side by side like the tibia and fibula. A little knowledge of vertebrate anatomy could go a long way here...
* The hands lack phalanges and thumb claws. The reasons for NOT getting rid of them are actually quite strong for titanosaurs, especially basal ones like Argentinosaurus. Suffice it to say that even derived titanosaurs like Diamantinasaurus had thumb claws - they just don't get preserved in most titanosaur hands because of the loose cartilage connections in the phalanges, which dessicated easily, allowing the thumb claws to be washed away.
* The feet are far too large and have an excessive fourth claw. This is not found on most sauropods.
* The metatarsals and toes are arranged in an almost linear pattern, rather than the semi-columnar, circular pattern that they would normally articulate in. And yet we criticize Chinese museum workers for making the exact same mistake with their sauropods... sheesh.
* The ankles have an extra "squashed mound of dough" bone beneath the real ankle bones, the Astralagus and the Calcaneum (both of which are too large anyway). This squashed mass is not a real bone at all, nor is it based on anything found in real fossils. One can only assume it represents ossified cartilage, but the ankle cartilage of sauropods NEVER ossified!

Those awful feet ! Linear arrangement of the digits, extra 4th claw, no vestigial 5th phalanx, 4th metacarpal is mysteriously thicker than the 3rd one, ankle bones WAY too big to match the tibia and fibula, and the feet are practically the size of Texas for a dinosaur that was only 110 ft. long!
You could probably sleep under those feet at night!

As for illustrations of Argentinosaurus.... some are great, some are okay, and most are downright terrible. The terrible ones are too many to list. But here is a sample of some of the better ones out there:

Aldo Chiappe. While his version isn't necessarily the most accurate, I do like how he really gives it the feeling of taking up a LOT of space. Great shading and the texture just draws you in...

Unknown artist. Neck needs a bit of work, but the head is unmistakably macronarian.

Illustration from the "Gigasaurier" German exhibition at the Senckenberg Museum (artist unknown). Neck is far too horizontal, but the head is definitely macronarian, which is a plus. Furthermore, I like the fact that the legs are not so "overbulked" with this one.

Fabio Pastori. Although I'm not a huge fan of his textures for either Argentinosaurus or Mapusaurus, he did get the basic shapes generally right.

Dinoraul. This is a 3D model, that is apparently available for sale. Probably the best 3D render of Argentinosaurus, though the neck seems a bit short and stocky. The head is excellent, nice big nose, but I can't help noticing the head's remarkably familiar "squashed" appearance - I suspect this guy must have ripped off my Puertasaurus' head in some capacity... (I'm NOT making any money off of this model, I guarantee you that).

Steve Kirk. This painting was done for one of the later editions of Dougal Dixon's Dinosaurs, which was probably one of the best dinosaur books a kid could ask for back in the 90's (the early editions didn't include Argentinosaurus). Very good size effect, if not the best leg/neck proportions. Thumbs up for the vertical neck! Unfortunately I can't post a larger image, but here it is if you want to see it close up.

Unknown artist. Nice long neck, though too horizontal, and the torso seems too short for Argentinosaurus. The pose, the juvenile, and the incorrect diplodocid-like head, give away that this artist probably copied Mark Hallett's famous Mamenchisaurus painting to some extent. A wonderful painting by the way, though outdated.

Greg Wenzel. He's is definitely working in the style of Greg Paul. Very nice and all around realistic painting of Argentinosaurus. Good skin texture, nice plant life, long semi-vertical neck, and macronarian head typical of basal titanosaurs. Skin color is a bit bland, but at least the shape and perspective have no problems. I just wish there was a bigger version online...

Greg Wenzel, different portion of the same painting. Though this scan is of very bad quality and distorted color, the painting itself looks pretty good anatomically. Nice big belly, long torso, legs not overbulked, and a long, near-vertical neck. The flock of birds really gives an idea of this animal's huge size and scale.

Wikidino image by Timothy Bradley. These digital paintings of many dinosaurs are all over internet forums. Most are actually pretty good. Though the neck may be a bit too short, the posture is excellent. Large torso, boxy head, tail high in the air. Massive, but not overbulked. It LOOKS like an Argentinosaurus, errors or no errors.

But what of the scientific illustrations? I mean actual skeletal diagrams...

Well, there are only really two. Greg Paul's, and Ken Carpenter's....

Modified from Paul (1994) and Carpenter (2006), respectively.

It is not a mistake that Greg Paul's skeletal shows fewer bones than Ken Carpenter's - it was done earlier, just one year after after Bonaparte and Coria's description paper came out (it didn't have diagrams of a couple of the vertebrae, or the femur shaft, which was dug up and referred to Argentinosaurus later). Though why he left out the sacrum is a mystery, as it was in the original paper.

The main difference aside from the bones, is obvious - the shape. Carpenter's version has much shorter arms and a very short thing neck. It's almost embarrassingly small... it's basically a scaled up Saltasaurus! In 2006 there seems to have been a trend towards "re-sizing" Argentinosaurus. Paul's version was considered by many in the field to be too brachiosaur-like, with its long vertical neck and tall arms. Carpenter proposed a radical re-interpretation of Argentinosaurus based on very late, derived titanosaurs like Saltasaurus - which reduced the length of Argentinosaurus to only about 80-90 feet or so. But this revision is not as reliable as it seems. Saltasaurus (which lived in the Maastrichtian epoch) was one of the last titanosaurs to evolve, millions of years after Argentinosaurus (Cenomanian epoch) was long extinct. It's not very likely that the early titanosaurs looked exactly like the last ones. Additionally, Saltasaurus was a small species, far smaller and shorter than Argentinosaurus, and specialized for low-grazing like a diplodocid or dicraeosaurid. The skulls of other small, short-necked titanosaurs like Bonitasaura bear this out - the teeth have become crowded in the front of the mouth and very thin, much like Diplodocus, in a wild case of convergent evolution. But something as huge and massive as Argentinosaurus must have been a treetop feeder - and it would have needed a very long neck. This is true of most if not all of the big basal titanosaurs. But that doesn't mean all of the late stage saltasaur-type titanosaurs were little short-necked grazers. There were some, like Alamosaurus, that had far longer necks, longer arms, and grew much larger than Saltasaurus. Very long necks and long arms didn't die with Brachiosaurus - they survived well into the end of the Cretaceous.

Alamosaurus sanjuanensis. Modified (by Matt Wedel) from Lehman and Coulson (2002) It punches a hole in the notion that all late-evolving titanosaurs were small-armed and short-necked. Of course, that tells us practically nothing about more basal titanosaurs.

Rapetosaurus as well, had an insanely long neck, and was a rather small saltasauroid/nemegtosaurid. And of course there were already several non-saltasauroid titanosaurs known by the time Carpenter wrote his paper that likely had huge necks. Puertasaurus, Phuwiangosaurus, possibly Huabeisaurus.... Yet from all the available reference taxa, Carpenter chose to use little puny low-grazing Saltasaurus as the silhouette shape for Argentinosaurus. Now I know preparing a paper has a lot of time strain and difficult decisions to make, and Ken Carpenter is a very knowledgeable and busy paleontologist with a lot of research going on (I actually met him at SVP, the guy's immensely accomplished). But I just don't understand why he picked Saltasaurus as the ideal body morph for a far larger and more primitive animal. I would have used something a bit closer to the basal end of titanosauria or titanosauriformes, something whose dorsal vertebrae actually resembled those of Argentinosaurus a bit... like Euhelopus, Phuwiangosaurus, Paluxysaurus, Sonidosaurus, heck, even Giraffatitan would be useful here. And they all had very long, probably vertical necks. In subsequent years, Futalognkosaurus turned up, a transitional titanosaur more advanced and younger than Argentinosaurus but more primitive and older than Saltasaurus - and it's a huge beast, with a completely preserved neck that even most brachiosaurs would have envied.

Small neck? I'll show YOU! Futalognkosaurus dukei, from Calvo, et. al. (2008)

So maybe using a "brachiosaur-like" model for Argentinosaurus isn't so bad after all. Monster necks seem to have been the rule rather than the exception in titanosauriforms both before and after its time. And Greg Paul's version of Argentinosaurus doesn't look all that much like a brachiosaur. It's something different. It's actually not copied from any other animal the way Carpenter's version is copied straight from Saltasaurus.

I had a hunch that Paul's version was generally correct. But that long whiplash tail bugged me. It's too diplodocid-like, and even the whip-tails wound on later titanosaurs weren't so thin and limp at the end. Also, Ken Carpenter's version does have two major advantages that Greg Paul's doesn't - it's got ALL the bones currently known (though it heavily distorts their shapes) and it gives an idea of the shape of the pelvis. It's also got a bit of pubis, which wasn't mentioned in the original description paper, but which may be present in some grainy internet photos. This was the clue for dissecting the actual number and shape of the missing bones.

The original bones on display in Plaza Huincul, Argentina.

Most problematic of all was the pelvis - how do you restore it when it's only known from a broken central piece of sacrum and slivers of ilium and pubis that aren't even documented? You do it very carefully.

Argentinosaurus partial sacrum (ventral view) and tibia (medial view) ...taken (and mysteriously flipped) by someone on the net, from Bonaparte and Coria (1993)

That stripe-shaded region is the first sacral vertebra's centrum, which is badly eroded but still visibly much larger than the other sacral centra. The sacrum, even though missing most of the 1st sacral ribs, much of one side, and the entire 6th vertebra, is still as long and almost as wide as the tibia. A rear as wide as your shin? That's a really big butt. Probably the biggest butt on record when complete, though there are some serious challengers to that title.The rough patch at right is a sort of articular surface to both the ilium and the hip socket. Replicating the other half of the sacrum digitally was pretty easy.

Next, adding the ilia and the 6th sacral vertebra, and fixing up the 1st sacral ribs.

Then, some modding, slimming the ilia, and cleanup of the remaining bones...

On second though, the wider ilia of the earlier version make more sense. They should be more flared out than the ilia of a brachiosaur, but a bit less than in a saltasaur.

Okay, that's the basic hip structure for now. Turns out that it was flipped backwards (the original paper has it the other way around and I didn't realize this when I had first found the diagram online) - no problem, I fixed it later as you will soon see. Next came the actual walking profile of the dinosaur itself. Despite the apparent similarity, I did not look at Greg Paul's version for direct reference here - I simply started my own from scratch (and facing the other direction).

This early sketch needed a lot of work, but it's a good start. The 12 dorsal vertebrae may be too many. Most titanosaurs had 11, a few even had just 10. There's some droop to the tail tip, but its far less thin and whip-like than the Greg Paul version. Remember, early titanosaurs like Argentinosaurus were basically evolutionary nephews of Euhelopus and Brachiosaurus. They weren't even close to mimicking diplodocids like the much later saltasaurs did. And most titanosaur whip-tail endings that have been discovered are of the late-stage saltasaur variety.

The drawing, shaded, wrinkled, and patterned. The top of the neck patterned similar to the way David Peters painted it in Don Lessem's book, Supergiants. Great book by the way (and beautifully illustrated), if you're interested in the biggest dinosaurs (or at least the ones that were considered the biggest back in the 90s).

From the original skeleton sketch and using Greg Paul and Ken Carpenter's skeletals as references, a rough skeletal diagram of the known parts took shape, with the left leg separated from the hips.

Then I refined it and shaded the missing portions....

And fixed the sacral count to six.... sort of.

First stage cleanup - captions, bone diagrams, scale bar, and human figure. The dorsal count is also reduced to 11. Probably a more accurate number.

Next, the tail was extended, and a front view of the dinosaur and the sacrum in ventral view (now correctly flipped) were added. I also added the sliver of ilium, which based on the sacrum's state of preservation, actually does appear to be the right ilium, not the left ilium as in Carpenter's skeletal. To get a good approximation of the sacrum's correct shape (and that of the ilia) from various angles, I referred to these diagrams:

Titanosauriform/titanosaur ilia and pubes, from Lehman and Coulson (2002). (Back then Isisaurus was known as "Titanosaurus" colberti.)

Sacra and ilia of Neuquensaurus, Saltasaurus, Opisthocoelicaudia, and strangely enough, Camarasaurus. From Salgado (1997). All of these hips show the ilia flared out at the front, and very strongly flared out in titanosaurs - unlike the warped speculative ilia of the Fernbank mount, which oddly curve inwards...

Then the pubis was shortened and thickened a bit, using Ken Carpenter's rather fuzzy interpretation of the fragment, and the pubis of Andesaurus for some reference. Though the classification of Argentinosaurus as an "andesaurid" is increasingly under attack these days, it does have several basic features in common with Andesaurus, and is about the same age. So I did not make the pubis identical, just similar.

Some lateral details of the vertebrae were altered using the description paper diagrams for anterior reference, and a posterior dorsal pic from Andesaurus for posterior reference.

A wider torso in front view, and modifying a Wikipedia image of the partial femur for a front-view diagram. The picture was from a bad angle, but another one from a different angle in Mazzetta, et. al. (2004) helped give a fuller idea of the femur's 3D form. Also front and rear views of some vertebrae are added, based on the description paper's drawings.

Next I made the limbs a bit thicker in both views and re-scaled the femur ends to conform more with complete titanosaur femurs. This diagram from Lehman and Coulson (2002) was very useful:

Next, it became clear that many of the dorsal vertebrae still had mistakes. So I looked back to the description again:

Anterior and three posterior dorsals. Cut and pasted from Bonaparte and Coria (1993)

Eventually it turned out that the diapophyses got much taller and more buttressed at the rear of the dorsal column than I had though, and the neural spines also seemed to go retrograde and tilt forward in the posterior dorsals. So pretty much every detail of the vertebrae had to be revised.

Some cheap anonymous photos of the dorsals floating around on the net were also useful.

Also the sacral neural spines were revised, to look more natural and closer to the fossil (the only halfway decent view of the top of the original sacrum is this):

(Notice the bit of right ilium on the sacrum. Another fragment of it lies in front of the near end of the femur.)

The sacral spines are very squashed, so in life they would have been a bit taller. Though maybe not as heightened as the ones in the Fernbank replica:

Yeah, those sacral spines look a bit too tall... like almost diplodocid-tall... I still can't get over the fact that the 1st sacral ribs are 90% missing in this cast (hence the huge unnatural gaps in front of the sacrum), the 6th sacral is missing entirely, that the sacrum isn't flush with the ilia anywhere along its length, and that the speculative (and somewhat too long) ilia are curving in at the front instead of out. It's like they just casted the sacrum raw, without restoring any of the missing parts and worn edges first, and wrung the ilia through a giant vise! Who gave the orders to do this horrible mutilation of such a grand dinosaur?

So in the end, after all the revision and rants, you get massively revised buttressed dorsals, and a scalloped sacrum ridge with some cool wavy lines. And one more rear view of a vertebra. With every possible bit of visual data extracted from the 1993 description paper and every photo available on the web, I'd say it's done!

This is it, the final product.

Feel free to comment on any part of this process. Or, feel free to challenge my arguments if you're one of the sculptors for the Fernbank mount. I'd really appreciate their side of the story. Enjoy :)

P.S. I've never heard of the skull of Argentinosaurus being found, but there is a mysterious skull that has popped up on the internet from time to time, that has no name but is rumored to be Argentinosaurus.

If anyone has information on what this strange skull really is, by all means let me know.

Guess what? It's Draw a Dinosaur Day!

2011-02-01T21:48:00.000-08:00

Well, I almost forgot to say that Draw a Dinosaur Day was on January 30th, but they are still taking submissions. Mad props to Trish over at ArtEvolved for getting the word out!

You don't have to be a paleo-Michelangelo or even an artist, period! Just sketch, doodle, or engrave a dinosaur, real or not, and send it in! Here's the submission link: http://drawadinosaurday.com/

When you click there, there's an easy upload window and you can write a quick caption about your dinosaur. Fill out your email, click "submit" and you're done!

They'll review it and post it usually within a few hours, so check back often (they absolutely won't reject your drawing based on skill or quality, trust me - the "reviewing" is just a formality to make sure it's not porn or spam). It's just a fun excuse to relax, bust out the pencils and.... draw a dinosaur!

I sent mine in today. And it's already generating some attention. Click HERE to see it on their site.