Horrible Megalosaurus larva tears its way out of Matt’s stomach
August 12, 2026
Historical note: Matt and I were idly going through some of the 276 unfinished draft posts on this blog (don’t judge us!) when we stumbled on this — written on 3 March 2011, but inexplicably not published. Here is is, as written.
Yeah, I get it, I’m fat.
Here’s a picture from the Leicester City Museum from my visit in the spring of 2004. In the foreground is a cast skeleton of the prosauropod Plateosaurus, and in the background is the mounted Cetiosaurus. The only mounted Cetiosaurus, anywhere.
The point of the photo is not me looking goofy, it’s that sauropods have really wacked out derived dorsal vertebrae, relative to practically everything else, but especially relative to prosauropods. In prosauropods, the cervicals look like slightly stretched dorsals, the caudals look like slightly smaller and simpler dorsals, but basically everything looks About The Same. In sauropods it’s sometimes hard to believe that the anterior and posterior dorsals belong to the same animal, they’re so different.
Which is old news, really. If sauropod vertebrae weren’t chock-full of architectural exotica, this blog wouldn’t have a reason to exist. But it’s cool that from so simple a beginning we get endless forms most beautiful (hat tip to Chuck D).
Documenting Skeletal Mounts
August 6, 2026
Post DinoCon, Matt is staying at my house, and we are trying hard to push out some science. This morning as he tried to innocently drink his coffee, I bombarded him with a passage from Taylor et al. (2025:87–88), read out loud. Instead of telling me to shut up and go away, he suggested I post it verbatim here. So here we go.
The mounted skeleton of Giraffatitan brancai, based on its paralectotype specimen MB.R.2181 (then “Brachiosaurus” brancai HMN S II) was unveiled in August 1937. With understandable delays due to World War II, Werner Janensch (1950) published his account of the mount 13 years later, specifying which elements were from the paralectotype, which had been filled in from other comparable specimens, and which were sculpted and at what scales. The Berlin museum’s atrium was renovated and its skeletons remounted in 2005–2007, and the revised Giraffatitan mount unveiled in 2007; only four years later, Remes et al. (2011) gave a comprehensive account of the remount.
Unfortunately, such published documentation is the exception rather than the rule, and the composition of many important sauropod mounts remains essentially undocumented. For example, in Matthew’s (1905) nine-page account of the American Museum of Natural History’s newly mounted Brontosaurus, only half a page is dedicated to summarizing the actual fossil material included. Little is known about the Yale Peabody Museum’s Brontosaurus excelsus mount based on the holotype YPM 1980, beyond extracts of Lull’s terse account reproduced by Schuchert and LeVene (1940) and then by Padian (1978). Over time, primary documentation is lost, memories fade, and the principals retire or die. There is no way now to ask Hatcher or Holland what was the source of the left ilium, femur, and tibia in the Carnegie Diplodocus mount; nor, in relation to a mounted skeleton erected only 30 years ago, to ask John McIntosh about the choices made in creating the rearing Barosaurus in the rotunda of the American Museum of Natural History.
We recognize that dinosaur mount renovations are intense projects, often executed under ambitious schedules, and typically overseen by scientists who have numerous other responsibilities competing for their attention. One of us (Lamanna) was the scientist in charge of the 2005–2007 renovation of the Carnegie Museum’s dinosaur galleries, and says without reservation that this was the most demanding project he has ever been involved in. Had those involved in the Diplodocus remount realized at the time that the decisions they made would be important for posterity, they would have kept running notes, material lists, and a correspondence archive.
Every mounted dinosaur skeleton is an important scientific and historical artifact: those of large and generally incomplete dinosaurs such as sauropods arise from complex scientific and political processes involving myriad controversies and decisions. We urge those who have the privilege of working on them to write up their choices for publication before memories evaporate and records are lost.
References
Current status
July 30, 2026
Mike insisted that I (deep breath) stop the process of resubmitting one of our collaborative manuscripts to post this, which is the clearest example of recursion I’ve ever seen or heard of.
A gentle rebuke, well taken
July 27, 2026
Matt and I had a great time at DinoCon 2026 this weekend just gone. One of the highlights for me was running into Tim Versteeg and Joschua Knüppe, who run the PaleoStream channel. They had a stall in the vendor hall, stocked with some fantastic palaeoart.
The reason I mention this is that Tim was wearing this T-shirt (co-designed by Tim and Joschua):
“I was born after Miker Taylor first presented on the Archbishop … And all I got was this lousy T-shirt”. That first presentation was Taylor (2005) at the London SVPCA.
Well. I mean to say. It’s nice that people care about my work, but to be called out about it in T-shirt form — something that must have required a fair bit of planning and organization — is an occasion for sober reflection.
In my defence, work has started on the Archibishop — you can see the in-progress manuscript on GitHub — but I have to admit that the “work has started” post is itself now more than eight years old, and the last time I touched that manuscript was eleven months ago. (But even that was a trivial change: the last real work was years before.)
As you can see, I was quite discombobulated by this challenge.
So. I will do this. I will not start any more side-projects(*), and just as soon as I’ve got the current crop of nearly-done papers submitted, I will return to the Archbishop description and power on through. And when I do submit it, the acknowledgements will mention The T-Shirt Of Motivation.
Because in all seriousness, I love that there are people so invested in my still-not-described titanosauriform that they’re prepared to throw shade through the medium of custom fashion design. Anyone prepared to put this much effort into their whining deserves some reward.
References
- Taylor, Michael P. 2005. Sweet seventy-five and never been kissed: the Natural History Museum’s Tendaguru brachiosaur. p. 25 in Paul M. Barrett (ed.), Abstracts volume for 53rd Symposium of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Comparative Anatomy, The Natural History Museum, London, 7th-9th September 2005. 41 pp.
(*) Narrator: “He will start more side-projects.”
Wildlife on the Planet Furaha by Gert van Dijk
July 23, 2026
We’re not in Kansas anymore. (c) Gert van Dijk (2025), used with permission.
A long time ago, bored with painting exploding spacecraft for others, I started painting alien creatures for my own pleasure.
— Gert van Dijk, from the Appendix
I’m distinctly late to this party, only having learned last year of the existence of Gert van Dijk’s Furaha project. Furaha is a magnificent work of worldbuilding, by an MD-PhD neurologist and professional artist, spanning decades of paintings, years of blog posts and articles across two websites, a YouTube channel, and now a physical book. I also somehow completely missed the opportunity to meet Gert van Dijk at DinoCon last year — a mistake I will be correcting as early as possible this year.
Furaha and Earth and their moons compared. (c) Gert van Dijk (2025), used with permission.
Gert’s* new book, Wildlife on the Planet Furaha: A Speculative Biology Guide to Alien Lifeforms, distills, refines, and in some cases expands the pre-existing Furahan material into an attractive, eminently digestible package, with a dizzying density of ideas packed into its 160 pages. There are short chapters up front about the Furahan solar system and the geography and plate tectonics of Furaha. Physically, Furaha is sufficiently Earth-like, in its gravity, topography, tectonics, and axial tilt and resulting seasonality, as to make no practical difference. The book is not an exploration of how Earth-like life might have evolved on a substantially different planet — say, a heavy-gravity world or a water world — but rather a tour of a profoundly Earth-like planet with multicellular life that nevertheless evolved into rather un-Earth-like plants and animals. Stephen Jay Gould argued that if we replayed the tape of the evolution of life on Earth, we might end up with substantially different organisms, with different body plans based on different historical contingencies. Wildlife on the Planet Furaha could be seen as an attempt to do that sort of tape-replaying, although that is my interpretation and nothing explicitly forced in the book.
*One could argue that I should adopt a more professional tone and refer to the author as van Dijk. But we’ve corresponded enough that doing so strikes me as unhelpfully standoffish, and one of the joys of blogging is the freedom to set my own rules. So: Gert.
Cloakfish. I can’t help but see these things as biological missiles. (c) Gert van Dijk (2025), used with permission.
After the introductory chapters, the bulk of the book covers the major clades of life on Furaha, including plants and fungus-analogues. Most of the chapters are 5-10 pages long. The exception, the 35-page chapter on hexapods, can be forgiven because hexapods are the dominant terrestrial vertebrate analogs on Furaha. As with Terran vertebrates, ‘terrestrial’ here is broad and loose, and includes flying and secondarily aquatic lineages.
If the environment asks how best to shape an animal leg bone or a plant stem, blind evolution is likely to come up with a tube to combine strength with low weight. Countless other examples show that evolution always attempts to solve mechanical problems while balancing energy demands. It is this evolutionary energy sieve that warrants the axiom ‘Darwinian evolution honours Newtonian mechanics’.
— Chapter 7, Rusps
The project seems motivated in large part by an honest attempt to imagine plausible organisms on an Earth-like world that break the geometric and bauplan constraints imposed by the unique history of life on Earth. What if trees could remodel their wood the same way that animals remodel their bones? What if some fish had necks? What if big animals had skeletons based on ladders instead of single notochords? What if fish and spiders were radially symmetrical? What if birds evolved from animals with more than four limbs?
A variety of radially-symmetrical spidrids… (c) Gert van Dijk (2025), used with permission.
These questions are not posed as mere flights of fancy — they are investigated with genuine intellectual rigor. The book has cutaway anatomy illustrations, and diagrams explaining how the alien animals of Furaha locomote. An Appendix at the back has the author’s notes on how the project itself has evolved over the years, and how some organisms were voted off the planet, as it were, for being insufficiently plausible.
…and how they get around. (c) Gert van Dijk (2025), used with permission.
The book is lavishly and generously illustrated. I don’t think there’s a single spread without color art, and the dominant mode of presentation is to have a full-page painting married to explanatory text and an inset with a range map and a silhouette. Almost all of the artwork is beautiful and evocative, as I think the preview images I’m posting here demonstrate. Some of it is slyly clever as well — many of the silhouettes of Furahan critters will repay close attention. There are also textual and artistic callouts to other works by other creators. Memo Koseman’s Snaiad gets a mention, for example. Any question of whether the white-skinned, four-winged Dipeau is an homage to the white pterodactyl-creature in Jean Giraud’s Arzach (and the related Taarna sequence in the 1981 Heavy Metal movie) is put to rest by its scientific name, Velivolator moebii arzachi, and by the human in its silhouette diagram. EDIT: and, duh, by the prominent ‘Hommage à Moebius’ in the corner of the painting… [forehead slap]
Terraforming (E,F) Large-scale action to change the overall environmental features of a planet, such as increasing global temperature and changing the composition of the atmosphere. The term was originally meant to indicate intentional actions to make a planet more Earth-like. Making a planet less Earth-like unintentionally proved equally feasible.
— from the Glossary
Although the book is played straight, and is by no means a comedy, it is laced with dry humor. This mostly takes the form of a keen but sympathetic cognizance that biology, like all sciences, is a human enterprise, and will therefore always be colored by human foibles — arrogance, overreach, parochialism, and simple lapses in self-awareness. In this way, the book rings true, at least to this mid-career biologist, and the occasion humorous barb lightens and adds interest to the reading experience. Like virtually everything about the book, the humor is right in the Goldilocks zone of being welcome, nicely judged, and not overdone.
Do I have any complaints? Hardly any worth mentioning, and each could be flipped over and turned into a compliment. A few pieces of art are merely serviceable, which is only noticeable because so much of the art in the book is outstanding. (Also, with no disrespect to either book, the worst piece of art in Furaha is still better than about half the art in The New Dinosaurs.) As others have noted in their reviews, the book introduces so much interesting stuff that it left me wanting more about almost everything. I want to know the whole phylogenetic and evolutionary history of the Furahan biota, I want to know about Furaha’s paleobiogeography, its mass extinctions, how food webs differ on the landmasses that have been isolated for 160-200 million years. And yet — the book is already an embarrassment of riches. It embodies so much creativity and imagination, intellectual rigor and artistic virtuosity, invested by a single person, that to ask for more seems greedy in the extreme. And on the positive side, with its short chapters and numerous illustrations, the book does not overstay its welcome. It never feels rushed or incomplete, but it also does not fall into the trap of over-explaining each topic — a too-easy pitfall for a passion project such as this.
I am charmed by both the silhouette of the Lausfresser, and by the story of its scientific naming. (c) Gert van Dijk (2025), used with permission.
If there are more Furaha books in the future, I’ll buy them the second they become available. If this one is all we get, well, it’s a pretty darned great book, sitting comfortably on the shelf next to Dougal Dixon’s After Man and Wayne Douglas Barlowe’s Expedition. I suspect that most readers of this blog will find the book an absorbing read, and if you’re into hard science fiction or speculative evolution, you probably have a copy in your hands or pre-ordered already. That’s a smart play, because it’s a triumph.
Want a second and third opinion? See the thoughtful reviews by Davide Gioia at Weird Anatomy, and by Darren Naish at Tetrapod Zoology.
Wildlife on the Planet Furaha is already available in the UK and Europe, and it is being published in the United States on July 28 — next Tuesday. If you’re coming to DinoCon this weekend, you can buy a copy from Gert in the vendor hall, at least until he sells out, which I think is quite likely. Go do the right thing.
Andy Frazer’s Aquilops, and DinoCon 2026
July 20, 2026
Life restoration of Aquilops by Andy Frazer. Andy is the creator and rightsholder, and I’m posting this small version with his permission. Go see his Instagram feed for more.
One of the highlights of DinoCon 2025 for me was getting to meet Andy Frazer, who you may know from Dragons of Wales, Novosaurs, and his numerous and mind-blowing life restorations of dinosaurs. We had a few minutes for an unhurried, one-on-one conversation, and I bought some prints, a no-AI-in-paleoart button, and his book EX|TINCT, a hardcover omnibus of his EX|TERRA art books.
My three-toed box turtle, Easty, modeling kertain in direct sunlight. Sadly this photo does not do her justice.
Here’s why Andy’s art sings to me: I’m kind of a keratin junky. F’rinstance, I have been around turtles all my life. Caring for turtles, watching turtles, thinking about turtles. Turtle shells are made of bony plates, including enlarged and expanded ribs, covered by thick scutes of keratin (except for softshells, leatherbacks, and a few other random perverts, who are still clad in keratin, but not the hard, glowy kind). Especially when it’s clean and wet, the keratin of turtle scutes has a degree of translucency, and at certain angles it can appear softly luminous. That interplay of light and keratin is a subtle thing to notice, and from everything I know (and don’t know) about art, a real challenge to achieve artistically.
Are you freaking kidding me? What a flex!
I already had some degree of familiarity with Andy’s work, but flipping through EX|TINCT I kept thinking, “Dang, this is a guy who knows his keratin!” I was also riding high on the 2025 Aquilaissance, and I saw in Andy’s Etsy shop that he accepted commissions. So, bing bang boom, I commissioned Andy to draw Aquilops, and he shipped me the original of this lovely pencil drawing:
But that’s not all! Andy told me that in the process of doing the drawing, he got a little obsessed with Aquilops, and decided on his own steam to make the full-color photorealistic rendering you see at the top of the post. I can certainly understand the phenomenon of becoming obsessed with Aquilops, and if that obsession leads to more gorgeous artwork, even better.
And furthermore, if you like either or both of Andy’s Aquilops restorations then I have good news for you: both of them appear in his new book, Ab Antiquo, along with a shedload more new, amazing art. I don’t have a copy yet, but I aim to correct that in the very near future.
I bring all this up in part because DinoCon 2026 is this coming weekend, July 25 and 26. Mike and I will be there, yapping about our very atypical careers in the Careers Panel Saturday afternoon, and otherwise catching up with old friends, making new ones, prrrrobably lightening our wallets in the vendor hall, and generally soaking up all the dinorifficosity. I’d say go buy your DinoCon tickets, but my understanding is that they’re all sold out for this year. Man, do I have good timing or what? EDIT by Mike: Go buy your DinoCon tickets at https://www.dinocon.co.uk/tickets — they are close to being sold out, but there are still some left.
Anyway, Andy Frazer will also be at DinoCon, selling and signing books and prints and, I feel quite certain, being smart and interesting and fun with talk with. You can also find Andy on Instagram, Etsy, and at his own site, andyfrazer.com.
Dogs are experiments in applied genetics
June 24, 2026
You may recall our dog, Eleanor, a.k.a. the Dire Floof.
She definitely has “domestication forehead“.
Despite looking pretty darned wolf-y at times. I dearly love this dog, but I take one look at that photo — or watch her literally shake the stuffing out of a formerly-sturdy dog toy — and I think, yowza, I’m glad she’s on my team.
We did an Embark DNA test and of Eleanor’s 8 great-grandparents, 4 were Great Pyrenees (50%), 3 were German Shepherds (37.5%), and one was a McNab (12.5%). I hadn’t heard of McNabs before; they’re a herding breed specifically bred for the hot, rugged conditions of California ranches. The Embark results showed her siblings and cousins broadly distributed across Southern California — we ran into one at a dog park and it was like looking at an Eleanor clone. So I’m reasonably certain that there’s a breeder around here somewhere who is deliberately producing these dogs. I wonder if the dash of McNab is included in hopes of improving their heat tolerance.
For reference — this may be handy in a minute — Eleanor is 26″ (66cm) tall at the shoulders, weighs 82 lbs (37 kg), and as of this writing is 2 years and 3 months old. She’s actually quite svelte under all that floof; my standard joke is that she looks like someone skinned a Great Pyrenees and threw the hide over a German Shepherd chassis. Her upright Shepherd ears are a dead giveaway that she’s a mix and not just a skinny Great Pyr.
As someone who is interested in evolution, development, artificial selection, and the morphological changes associated with domestication, watching Eleanor mature from a 40lb, 6mo pup when we adopted her to a full adult has been utterly fascinating. From reading around, both her physical makeup and her personality seem like a mosaic of classic Great Pyr and German Shepherd traits. We were fortunate to miss out on the drooling and the difficult-to-train-out barking that characterize some pure Great Pyrs, but she got a good dose of the German Shepherd hindlimb geometry that may cause problems later in life.
Last Friday we got Eleanor a little brother, Franklin. Like his adoptive sis, he’s a rescue. Franklin, his mom, and his littermates were living rough in Murrieta, about an hour south of us. A local rescue down there scooped them up after mom was injured defending her puppies from coyotes. Now the whole family is in foster care and up for adoption (about which more in a sec).
We haven’t done the DNA test yet, but we will soon, and we can’t freakin’ wait to see what’s going on with this rascal. His mom is listed as a Great Pyr and looks it, down to the tiny lower central incisors. (We were deliberately hunting for a half-Pyr because Eleanor has been such a good, gentle, loving dog.) We heard there’s a photo of dad, or at least a father to some puppies in the same litter, who looks like a beagle or basset hound (I did not know until the past week that puppies the same litter can have different fathers). Either ID looks plausible, based on Franklin’s sibs, and there’s definitely something short-legged in his background.
If Eleanor looks like a slim Great Pyrenees with perky ears, Franklin just looks like a hound — short legs, loose skin, floppy ears, a little jowly (but, very fortunately, not a drooler). So far the only obvious Great Pyr traits are his white coat, freckles (some GPs have them), calm disposition (thank heavens), and size.
Left: Eleanor, 2 years and 3 months. Right: Franklin, 4 months and 3 weeks.
I haven’t until now mentioned an important fact — Franklin and his sibs were born on January 29 of this year, which means he is still about a week shy of being 5 months old. And I reckon he’s already 35 or 40 lbs, I’ll find out exactly when I take him to the vet for his well-puppy check tomorrow. That’s a big pup for not even 5 months!
I wanted to get this post up before all the data comes in. Guesses on Eleanor’s ancestry were all over the map — Chow Chow, Akita, Alaskan Malamute, and I had a stranger walk up and congratulate me on my “beautiful Golden”, whatever that’s supposed to be.* All wrong, myself not least — I thought for certain she’d be at least part Siberian Husky. Now the game begins again. How much does Franklin weigh now, and how big will he get? What’s his ancestry? How will he change as he grows up — will he look like the world’s biggest dachshund? I’ll provide updates as we get answers to these questions, but I thought it might be fun to get some speculation going in the comments.
*Almost immediate update: I had been thinking that Eleanor doesn’t look much like a Golden Yellow Lab or a Golden Retriever, but I’d forgotten that when she lays her ears down she could maybe pass for a Golden Retriever, or at least a mix. Who am I to judge? I thought she was a friggin’ Husky!
If you’re within striking distance of SoCal and you’d like to adopt Franklin’s mom or any of his siblings, please look them up on Petfinder:
- Blossom (mom, looks like a Great Pyr)
- Basil (brother, Great Pyr/hound mix)
- Sage (brother, Great Pyr/hound mix; note that the dog listed on Petfinder as Dill is actually Sage, and the dog listed as Sage was actually Dill, and is now Franklin — Franklin Dill-ano Roosevelt, in full)
…and reach out to Rovers Return Dog Rescue, through Petfinder, directly at the website, or on Facebook. Sandra and the foster homes she works with are incredibly knowledgeable and compassionate folks. Yes, there’s an adoption fee, but these dogs are fixed, vaxxed, microchipped, flea-treated, house-trained, and will be loving and loyal companions. I’ll do my best to keep this list updated as they find homes.
Incidentally, as much as I loathe promoting the world’s largest retailer, there is a pretty good Prime Day deal on Embark DNA kits right now. EDIT: Chewy.com has the same tests for the same price. Which is a good segue back to the point of this post:
Who is this dog? Post your guesses in the comments.
My adventures with Tri-bear-atops
June 7, 2026
One month ago this weekend, I was at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History to yap about horned dinosaurs, a tie-in to the new Bizarre Headgear exhibit. Some utter genius in the gift shop had set up what you see above: a Triceratops mask on a stuffed polar bear. This charmed me immensely, in part because it reminded me of one of my favorite memes:
That image lives rent-free in my head forever.
Tri-bear-atops also reminded me of Natalie Metzger’s squirrel wearing an Aquilops skull, a signed print of which lives rent-free in my office. (BTW this print and many other awesome things are available in Natalie’s shop at The Fuzzy Slug. Incidentally, I got to meet Natalie at NorWesCon 2018 and she is just as awesome and hilarious in person as you’d expect from her art. I myself am just as forgetful and procrastinatory as you’d expect from an 8-year-overdue endorsement.)
I loved Tri-bear-atops so much I put it in my talk, at the end when I was encouraging folks to see the whole museum and patronize the gift shop. I said in the talk — truthfully! — that I would have bought it but it wouldn’t fit in my carry-on, so someone else should do the right thing.
That advice landed closer than I expected — my brother Ryan and his family surprised me with it for my birthday! Not a recreation, not “inspired by”, they just went back to the museum and bought the OG Tri-bear-atops and socked it away for a month. A special shout-out to my nephew Eli, who bought the Triceratops mask with his own money, and who (in classic older brother fashion) assures me that his siblings Jewel and Isaac had nothing to do with it.
I feel like the genre of dinosaur-masks-on-things-that-aren’t-dinosaurs has legs. Chances are good that you’ll see more here in time.
Get ready to scroll.
In 2017, Wollaton Hall in Nottinghamshire hosted an exhibition, Dinosaurs Of China: Ground Shakers To Feathered Flyers. Wollaton Hall Curator Adam Smith arranged for the SVPCA attendees to visit the exhibition after the conference as a “field trip”. Needless to say, the star of the show for me was the rearing cast skeleton of Mamenchisaurus hochuanensis. But it’s so tall, it’s very hard to photograph well.
While we were there, Matt took a a lot of photos of this skeleton, and among them were several sequences showing the Mamenchisaurus from head to tail. Moving with my usual haste, it took me only nine short years to do something with these.
And by “do something”, what I mean is “ask someone else to do something”. Specifically, I sent the best sequence to Jarrod Davis, a very old friend of Matt’s and an Emmy-award winning visual effects specialist. And I asked him — as we have done before — to use his skills to stitch the sequence together. The result is the photo above.
It’s high resolution (3171 x 7931 pixels), so here’s how I recommend viewing. Click through to the full-sized image. Put your browser into full-screen mode. Adjust the scaling so the image fits the width of the screen. Then just enjoy scrolling through that long, long neck.
My deep gratitude to Jarrod for doing the work on this, and to Matt for taking the original photos. The image is destined for a paper that I’m working on, but it was just too good not to share with y’all.
I want to get this printed out extra-large and attach it to the wall of my office, ceiling-to-floor.
One reason I was so happy to be invited to the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History to talk about horned dinosaurs is because the museum has two of the coolest ones on display: Aquilops, the smallest and earliest ceratopsian in North America, and Pentaceratops, one of the largest and latest. Naturally I had to check in on my baby, and its rather more imposing relative.
Here’s the Aquilops exhibit without any big hairy mammal heads mucking up the view.
The skull of Aquilops in three versions: the actual holotype fossil down below, a reconstruction of the distorted skull with the missing bits sculpted in by preparator and reptile-reconstructor extraordinaire Kyle Davies (see more of his work here), and a reconstruction of the skull as it might have looked before it went through the ravages of taphonomy.
And the holotype skull, OMNH 34557, by itself. If you’re wondering why I’m making with so many photos, it’s because my last attempt, 10 years ago, was not without criticism. I was still just rolling with an iPhone this time, but iPhones are a lot better these days, and I’m a less wretched photographer.
And just to the left of the Aquilops cabinet is the monster Pentaceratops with its 10.5-foot-long skull (3.2 meters).
The Pentaceratops is one of my favorite things in any museum. As a grad student back in the late 90s, I gave a lot of behind-the-scenes tours of the new museum as it was going up, and the Pentaceratops was a hit from the start. I actually preferred the view from the animal’s left side, now blocked by the wall behind it — the wide spread of the front and back legs made for a much more dynamic appearance. I should ask around and see if anyone has any photos of the skeleton from that side.
There was a plan kicking around back then to completely wall in the Pentaceratops except for a front viewing window, the idea being that it was the jewel of the collection and would be presented as if in a giant jewelry display case. That plan got nixed — correctly — because it would have precluded this head-on view, which lets you imagine your last moments before 7 tons of angry ceratopsian turns you into a Jackson Pollock painting. My only (and minor) unhappiness about this view is that darned spotlight to the left of the frill, which glares in photos.
You can scoot a smidge to the right and use the frill itself to block that light, but now you’re not quite looking at the animal head-on. Still, a heck of a nice view of a truly awesome critter. You can’t go wrong either way.
Unlike their cousins across the way in the “Bizarre Headgear” exhibit, who will only be on display until August 23, Aquilops and Pentaceratops are permanent fixtures at the museum. Check ’em out if you get the chance.
ALSO, since you had the impeccable good taste to click on a post about Aquilops:
The Aquilops merch train keeps rolling along, and coming down the pike is this life-size Dolores from Jurassic World Rebirth. I’ve seen fanboys online crying that the first life-size critter in the Hammond Collection line wasn’t a Compy or a baby Velociraptor. Ha ha, Aquilops FTW, theropods get back in line. Anyway, theoretically this thing will drop sometime this summer or fall. Chances are real good that its appearance on store shelves will not go unremarked here.
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week