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So, this morning, I woke up to some excellent news. PeerJ had accepted our* new manuscript to their journal, & it was formally published this morning.
*Whaddya mean "our"? Well, this manuscript was not just my own doing. This is a project started all the way back in late 2010/11 as an SVP abstract/presentation, and a few years back I re-visited it with
Gunnar Bivens.
We've worked very hard though, since December, to get this pushed out finally this year. That means... technically we're published scientists now!
This paper is on the enigmatic Ruyangosaurus, a poorly known lognkosaurian (yes, that hypothesis is correct) from the mid-Cretaceous of China. And yes, it likely is China's biggest dinosaur, given that it would outmass "Mamenchisaurus" sinocanadorum substantially, and that the latter is apparently known only from "a couple of cervicals" since GSP's confession. The dataset we assembled references the data matrices from a number of recent papers including Gonzalez-Riga et. al., 2016 (the Notocolossus paper), and so far the characters for Ruyangosaurus put it firmly in lognkosauria. The previous assignations of this giant to "Andesauridae" or "non-titanosaur somphospondyli" were based on a very limited number of basal characters common to most titanosaurs and/or most titanosauriforms, but there was very little mention of the derived characters of Ruyangosaurus.
Here's a taste of the goodness: the second dorsal in glorious high-resolution-
Fig. 1.
The full citation, as well as the link, is below:
(2017) The Chinese colossus: an evaluation of the phylogeny of Ruyangosaurus giganteus and its implications for titanosaur evolution. PeerJ Preprints5:e2988v1 doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprint…
We've already received comments, & any more are always welcome to help out!
**So why did I say technically? Well, this was published as a preprint, which means it's not formally peer reviewed yet. It is, however, a valid piece of the scientific literature and contains a literal mountain of data, & therefore valuable nonetheless.
*Whaddya mean "our"? Well, this manuscript was not just my own doing. This is a project started all the way back in late 2010/11 as an SVP abstract/presentation, and a few years back I re-visited it with
Gunnar Bivens.
We've worked very hard though, since December, to get this pushed out finally this year. That means... technically we're published scientists now!
This paper is on the enigmatic Ruyangosaurus, a poorly known lognkosaurian (yes, that hypothesis is correct) from the mid-Cretaceous of China. And yes, it likely is China's biggest dinosaur, given that it would outmass "Mamenchisaurus" sinocanadorum substantially, and that the latter is apparently known only from "a couple of cervicals" since GSP's confession. The dataset we assembled references the data matrices from a number of recent papers including Gonzalez-Riga et. al., 2016 (the Notocolossus paper), and so far the characters for Ruyangosaurus put it firmly in lognkosauria. The previous assignations of this giant to "Andesauridae" or "non-titanosaur somphospondyli" were based on a very limited number of basal characters common to most titanosaurs and/or most titanosauriforms, but there was very little mention of the derived characters of Ruyangosaurus.
Here's a taste of the goodness: the second dorsal in glorious high-resolution-
Fig. 1.
The full citation, as well as the link, is below:
(2017) The Chinese colossus: an evaluation of the phylogeny of Ruyangosaurus giganteus and its implications for titanosaur evolution. PeerJ Preprints5:e2988v1 doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprint…
We've already received comments, & any more are always welcome to help out!
**So why did I say technically? Well, this was published as a preprint, which means it's not formally peer reviewed yet. It is, however, a valid piece of the scientific literature and contains a literal mountain of data, & therefore valuable nonetheless.
The Egyptian Keystone: Mansourasaurus shahinae!
Recently we have this new species of titanosaur from Egypt which helps fill in some HUGE gaps.
Egypt is of course famous for much mythology and lore surrounding the raising of obelisks and pyramid keystones or capstones. Now we can add to that list, the "holy grail" or "keystone" of titanosaur evolution - Mansourasaurus shahinae.
Mansourasaurus shahinae is not all that large by titanosaur standards (the published skeletals shows it at about 8.5m, but I suspect that the neck was a good bit longer than they illustrated, as well as having more than the mere 13 vertebrae drawn here, so more like a total length of 10.5 or 11m at least), but enou
Regarding References
Just a happy jolly reminder to all who come here, please ask before using my work as reference for your work. If I know about it ahead of time, I'm usually okay with it. If you want references, respect the artist. If I see the opposite continuing to happen, I can simply stop posting skeletals here or make them purely pay-to-play (already get contracts so I don't need DA prints revenue, if this whole site died it wouldn't hurt me). Your choice peeps.
Another note; if you need a scale figure, please create your own human silhouette and scale bar. Don't copy mine. It's not that hard.
Argentinosaurus may actually still be the biggest.
I'd been meaning to get around to this for a while...
We all know Argentinosaurus is woefully incomplete. But for the first time we can get a mostly solid ides of what it looked like. For a long time, most Argentinosaurus reconstructions had been either purely speculative (i.e. Greg Paul - though he wasn't too far off the mark given the data available in the 1990s) or based on "cloning" the body of a distant relative (Ken Carpenter most notoriously used Saltasaurus, which as a low-grazing dwarf species, is among the worst models for restoring any fragmentary titanosaur over 20m).
More recently some speculative skeletals have cloned Malawisa
The Chubut Monster is now described and named!
Today the Chubut Monster, possibly the largest dinosaur known, has been published.
There are apparently six specimens from the same site. The largest of them may have exceeded 120 feet in length, and though the paper proposed a maximum mass of 82 tons, I suspect that when restored with the correct rib curvature and soft tissue levels, this animal may have exceeded 115 tons.
The AMNH mount, which is entirely made of fiberglass replicas, appears to be based on the holotype and a few similar-sized specimens. These are still smaller than the individual represented by the gigantic femur on the forklift pallets, which is a bit more eroded than
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Nice!
Question I also asked somewhere else on your deviant site: does this study also include the exceptionally large (posterior?) dorsal with a centrum of over 60 cm (68 cm?)?
Question I also asked somewhere else on your deviant site: does this study also include the exceptionally large (posterior?) dorsal with a centrum of over 60 cm (68 cm?)?