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Some of you may know that Nima Sassani and I have had a debate on the size of Futalognkosaurus, me advocating a smaller size than Nima.
Well, a new exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum has a new exhibit entitled "Ultimate Dinosaurs: Giants from Gondwana" that includes, among other species, Futalognkosaurus dukei. Here is a photo:
Image credit: Lorie Pierce (click image to enlarge)
Anyways, I put the photo into GIMP and using the 96 cm length for the 6 sacral vertebrae given in one of the descriptive papers, I get a dorsal column length of ~350 cm long from the photo. Compare this to my earlier estimate of ~298 cm. So it appears that I was wrong, and Nima was right.
See, this is how science works? You make a hypothesis, wait for the data to confirm or deny it, and when it over turns your favored hypothesis, you suck it up and admit your wrong (*ahem*, David Peters).
Anyways, just a short rant.
Well, a new exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum has a new exhibit entitled "Ultimate Dinosaurs: Giants from Gondwana" that includes, among other species, Futalognkosaurus dukei. Here is a photo:
Image credit: Lorie Pierce (click image to enlarge)
Anyways, I put the photo into GIMP and using the 96 cm length for the 6 sacral vertebrae given in one of the descriptive papers, I get a dorsal column length of ~350 cm long from the photo. Compare this to my earlier estimate of ~298 cm. So it appears that I was wrong, and Nima was right.
See, this is how science works? You make a hypothesis, wait for the data to confirm or deny it, and when it over turns your favored hypothesis, you suck it up and admit your wrong (*ahem*, David Peters).
Anyways, just a short rant.
Some more thoughts on theropod lips
Due to recent new events, this hypothesis has come up again. My initial thoughts over at my (mostly dormant) blog, Part 1 of 2: https://palaeozoographer.wordpress.com/2016/06/22/reports-of-the-death-of-lipless-theropods-are-greatly-exaggerated/
I welcome comments as always, but would prefer them over there than over here. :)
Thoughts about the size of Dreadnoughtus
A new post: https://palaeozoographer.wordpress.com/2015/01/27/the-incredibly-shrinking-dreadnoughtus/
A new year, a new blog
So, I finally decided to start a proper blog: https://palaeozoographer.wordpress.com/
So far, all I have is an introductory post, but I should be posting a series of posts on Dreadnoughtus in the next few days. Stay tuned!
-Zach
Was Amphicoelias a rebbachisaur?
Update (10/22/18): Dr. Ken Carpenter has recently published a new paper supporting the view below (and cites me favorably), but I would also be remiss to not recongize Dr. Andrea Cau for having thought up this idea 2 years before me. Sadly, he was not cited in Carpenter's paper. He and I both were unaware of Cau's work.
The last time I wrote about the size of Amphicoelias, I still used Diplodocus as a comparison. One of the comments that was made was that my size estimate was likely wrong, as Amphicoelias was probably a basal diplodocoid, not a diplodocid proper. After a little investigation, it turned out that two phylogenetic analyses have
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Gregory S paul estimated a max size of 30 meters 