Museums and TV have dinosaurs' posture all wrong, claim scientists

Museums and TV have dinosaurs' posture all wrong, claim scientists

Research suggests the largest dinosaurs, the sauropods, did not stick their necks out in front of them but held their heads high

Ian Sample, science correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 27 May 2009 00.05 BST


The popular depiction of sauropod dinosaurs such as Camarasaurus,
above, as lumbering creatures with outstretched necks may be wrong.
Photograph: Getty

The staid and scholarly world of palaeontology was thrown into rare turmoil yesterday following the latest salvo in an argument that dates back to Jurassic times.

The row erupted after a team of British fossil experts published a fresh analysis of animal bones in an arcane academic journal. In their paper they challenge a view of dinosaurs that is so familiar it has almost become the accepted truth.

The controversy goes to the heart of our perception of the largest of the dinosaurs, the sauropods, which became widespread 150m years ago in the late Jurassic. According to the researchers, the beasts did not stick their necks out in front of them as so often depicted, but held their heads high on majestic, curving, swan-like necks.

The claim overturns the popular impression of the lumbering creatures given by museum exhibits and TV series like the BBC's Walking with Dinosaurs. The sauropods include many of the most well known prehistoric beasts, such as diplodocus and apatosaurus, the dinosaur formerly known as brontosaurus. Some sauropods were more than 40m long and weighed over 100 tonnes.

"Unless sauropods carried their heads and necks differently from every living vertebrate, we have to assume that the base of their neck was curved strongly upwards," said Mike Taylor, a palaeontologist at Portsmouth University in the UK, who led the study. "In some sauropods this would have meant a graceful, swan-like S-curve to the neck, and a look quite different from the recreations we are used to seeing today."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/may/27/dinosaurs-sauropods-posture-heads-upright-necks

Life sucks.

as much of the truth about this as any guy on the street. It's like the guys that make the big pronouncements
about the origins of the universe.

:eyes:

get to see a new sketch of the "correct" posture.

I try to remain fairly au courant as I age but I'm absolutely unrepentant about calling them brontosauruses.

...into vogue. Taylor, Wedel, and Naish are right though, sauropods had swan-like necks. Some were more swan-like than others, but they weren't straight (to be fair, even the straighter-neck crowd didn't think they were pencil-straight), nor were they mostly horizontal.

Diplodocoids like Diplodocus, Apatosaurus (aka Brontosaurus), Supersaurus, Barosaurus, Dicraeosaurus, and Amargosaurus had more horizontal necks and stretched bodies overall, but the neck did have a nice S-shape.

Supersaurus


The other main branch, the macronarians had more upright swan-like necks and included Brachiosaurus, Camarasaurus, and the titanosaurs.

This beautiful specimen of Camarasaurus shows of a strongly curving neck (partially due to rigor mortis)


The paper is available for free at the following link (pdf):
http://www.app.pan.pl/archive/published/app54/app54-213.pdf

Names. Numbers. Bank accounts.....yesterday!

PB

how did they get through the door of the Ark smart guy?

Isn't it obvious? They didn't go through the doors. They just took advantage of the "S" curve and hooked them to the sides of the ark.
:eyes: