Giraffatitan brancai - Imperial German edition!

Here's a fine and well-preserved old-school printing of the greatest sauropod skeletal ever made, as it would have appeared if it were published in Germany in 1914 when Werner Janensch described the species.

Identical to the original version paleo-king.deviantart.com/art/… , except in German and printed on old Prussian birch pulp in the best robust Kaiserreich style!

Of course some things are not totally historical about this. It wasn't called Giraffatitan back then, and the state of paleontology (and full-body skeletals) in those days was far less accurate and precise than today. Many of the engravings used for reference in this were only printed in the 1950s. And the catalog numbers weren't prefixed with "HMN" (let alone the more annoying "M.BR" of today) because the university that owned the museum wasn't yet called Humboldt, but Friedrich Wilhelm University (actually in Janensch's early papers they don't even have a museum prefix). But if Janensch and his illustrators knew then what we know today, and had more resources, this is the closest thing to what they would have come up with. It does incorporate more of Janensch's detailed images and data than any other in existence, including the original dorsal order, the long-forgotten 12th dorsal, and ALL of the neck of HMN SII including the proatlas, which makes it totally unique in Der Welt. *Note: no GSP skeletals were harmed during the production of this image.*


Giraffatitan brancai

Family: Brachiosauridae (intermediate position)
Time: Late Jurassic, Kimmeridgian-Tithonian epochs, ~150 mya
Location: Tendaguru Formation, Tanzania (the lower, middle, and upper "Saurian Marls")
Estimated mass: ~33 tons (subadult HMN SII/S116/Aa) up to ~50 tons (HMN XV2/HMN Fund no.)

References:

Janensch, W. (1914). "Übersicht über der Wirbeltierfauna der Tendaguru-Schichten nebst einer kurzen Charakterisierung der neu aufgeführten Arten von Sauropoden." Archiv für Biontologie, 3 (1): 81–110.
Janensch, W. (1922). "Das Handskelett von Gigantosaurus robustus und Brachiosaurus brancai aus den Tendaguru-Schichten Deutsch-Ostafrikas". Centralblatt für Mineralogie, Geologie und Paläontologie 1922(15):464-480.
Janensch, W. 1935-36. Die Schädel der Sauropoden Brachiosaurus, Barosaurus und Dicraeosaurus aus den Tendaguru-Schichten Deutsch-Ostafrikas. Palaeontographica, Supplement 7 1(2):147-298.
Janensch, W. (1950a). "Die Skelettrekonstruktion von Brachiosaurus brancai". Palaeontographica, Supplement 7 (I, 3):97-103.
Janensch, W. (1950c). "Die Wirbelsäule von Brachiosaurus brancai". Palaeontolographica, Supplement, 7:27-93.
Paul, G.S. (1988). "The brachiosaur giants of the Morrison and Tendaguru with a description of a new subgenus, Giraffatitan, and a comparison of the world's largest dinosaurs". Hunteria, 2(3): 1–14. (Yes I have read the paper, and no, I did not copy Paul's skeletal - which is anatomically flawed in several ways.)
Taylor, M.P. (2009). "A Re-evaluation of Brachiosaurus altithorax Riggs 1903 (Dinosauria, Sauropod) and its generic separation from Giraffatitan brancai (Janensch 1914)." Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 29(3): 787-806. www.miketaylor.org.uk/dino/pub…