5 ms·

Genuinely, my all-time favourite image: Mamenchisaurus hochuanensis

102 points by surprisetalk 4mo ago

gerdesj 4mo ago
He's got some neck!
abnry 4mo ago
How can an animal even have a neck that long? Was it clear from the fossils that it is this long because I am skeptical.
- bensyverson 4mo ago
  No, there's no way to tell—the paleontologists probably just took a bunch of bones from the site and threw them together in a way that looked cool. /s
  - sizzzzlerz 4mo ago
    Now that is an idea for a The Far Side cartoon
    - tonymillion 4mo ago
      Life imitates art imitating life: The story [1] of the Brontosaurus is an interesting one... [1] https://obscuredinosaurfacts.com/blog/post/2019/08/31/brontosaurus-isnt-real.html https://obscuredinosaurfacts.com/blog/post/2019/08/31/bronto...
  - jjk7 4mo ago
    It probably had a snake in it's belly, and they thought it was it's neck
- e2e8 4mo ago
  This video [0] tries to answer the question of how we know what we know for a different species but I imagine the methods are similar. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vea06e6x_E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vea06e6x_E
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- NooneAtAll3 4mo ago
  relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/3185/ https://xkcd.com/3185/
HarHarVeryFunny 4mo ago
I've got to wonder how realistic this pose is. Even if it could rear up and balance like that, the energy expenditure vs calorific gain seems like a losing proposition. You're talking about raising the center of gravity of it's 40-ton body mass by 10-20 feet just to grab a very small mouthful of low calorific leaves. I'd guess the reason the sauropods had an extra long neck was rather so they could AVOID moving as much as possible - stand in one place and just swivel neck around to graze a large area.
- w10-1 4mo ago
  If they could eat from higher branches than others, they could avoid competition for resources.
  - HarHarVeryFunny 4mo ago
    Sure, but they wouldn't routinely be doing it unless a) it was possible, and b) there was an actual benefit - they gained more calories per rear than they expended doing it.
- throwup238 4mo ago
  That’s an ongoing debate within paleontology that often takes place on a species by species basis. The argument goes that since diplodocids (which this species is not) had heavy muscular tails, their center of gravity was near their hips, making it easy to rear up since they were effectively already a balanced seesaw and could use the tail as a third point of contact to balance. Species in Mamenchisaurus share similar pelvic and tail features and M. youngi was show to have a stiff neck that couldn’t lift very easily, so it’s inferred that these may have reared as well. There are center of mass and skeletal models and stuff to determine whether rearing is possible but one hasn’t been made for this species specifically. Sidenote: you underestimate the cardiovascular cost of pumping blood up a 5-15 meter neck. It’s not at all clear that a rearing strategy is more expensive energy wise. In their case it’s less spending energy to standup than just leaning back to let their skeletal structure and center of mass do the work. Mostly I think this pose is a matter of logistics. They probably just had more vertical space than horizontal to work with for this exhibit. Even though they’re fiberglass, the casts for these guys run well into the tons per skeleton so it can be challenging to mount the armatures in an existing structure and it turns into a game of fossil tetris balanced by the cost of structural support modifications needed (there almost always are for a fossil of this size).
fsckboy 4mo ago
this statement is literally true: this dinosaur has a soar throat.
mankhb2k 4mo ago
if the head falls of, they'll have to take everything apart just to put the head back on
- dudeinjapan 4mo ago
  meh just put the head on the end of the tail, a lot less effort and no one will be any the wiser.
gibspaulding 4mo ago
It’s really bugging me that whatever software was used to assemble this did some weird AI-ey blending from the lower jaw into the crown moulding.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- arjie 4mo ago
  [dead]
throw0101d 4mo ago
See also perhaps recent Odd Lots podcast episode "Inside the Booming Market for Dinosaur Fossils": > Two years ago, Citadel's Ken Griffin paid almost $45 million for a stegosaurus skeleton, making it the most expensive fossil ever sold at auction. So why are dinosaur bones joining the collections of millionaires instead of museums? How does the private market for fossils actually work? And how similar is it to the market for art and other antiquities? In this episode, we speak with Salomon Aaron, a director at London-based gallery David Aaron, where he is the gallery's in-house broker for dinosaur fossils. We talk about how fossils are found and priced, what it's like to work alongside dinosaur hunters, how his gallery identifies potential buyers, and why Joe thinks something about the birds-to-dinosaurs evolutionary pipeline is off. * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hf4nv3ggdqE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hf4nv3ggdqE * https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/inside-the-booming-market-for-dinosaur-fossils/id1056200096?i=1000765739904 https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/inside-the-booming-mar... * https://omny.fm/shows/odd-lots/why-dinosaur-fossils-are-selling-for-millions-of-dollars https://omny.fm/shows/odd-lots/why-dinosaur-fossils-are-sell...
camillomiller 4mo ago
“Genuinely”. Did you have to write the headline with an LLM? Or you genuinely chose to use the most abused-by-LLMs adverb in the entire English vocabulary?
- evanklem2004 4mo ago
  its a dinosaur pic bruh chill
- gota 4mo ago
  The blog post is clearly human written. One minor signal in the title is nothing and should not, I think, offend anyone to the point it seems to have offended you. Besides, I refuse to accept that we are now meant to police ourselves and our use of language because AI copies it. Write the way you write, it will be apparent in your text (as it is for the author), and we'll deal with the unfortunate few cases in which a false-positive signal (like 'genuinely' in this title) the correct way: completely ignoring it
adonovan 4mo ago
How many parts is this skeleton disassembled into in transit? Each bone? Crazy project!
shmeeed 4mo ago
I find the post mostly notable for its dry humour. :) The picture itself... let's just say, my smartphone as of 2017 could have produced this vertical panorama all by itself in much less time than nine years, and without the help of an Emmy-award-winning SE specialist - albeit at lower resolution, meaning it wouldn't make a good print. So it was worth it in the end!

102 points by surprisetalk 4mo ago

He's got some neck!

abnry 4mo ago

How can an animal even have a neck that long? Was it clear from the fossils that it is this long because I am skeptical.

bensyverson 4mo ago
No, there's no way to tell—the paleontologists probably just took a bunch of bones from the site and threw them together in a way that looked cool. /s
- sizzzzlerz 4mo ago
  Now that is an idea for a The Far Side cartoon
  - tonymillion 4mo ago
    Life imitates art imitating life: The story [1] of the Brontosaurus is an interesting one... [1] https://obscuredinosaurfacts.com/blog/post/2019/08/31/brontosaurus-isnt-real.html https://obscuredinosaurfacts.com/blog/post/2019/08/31/bronto...
- jjk7 4mo ago
  It probably had a snake in it's belly, and they thought it was it's neck
e2e8 4mo ago
This video [0] tries to answer the question of how we know what we know for a different species but I imagine the methods are similar. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vea06e6x_E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vea06e6x_E
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
NooneAtAll3 4mo ago
relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/3185/ https://xkcd.com/3185/

HarHarVeryFunny 4mo ago

I've got to wonder how realistic this pose is. Even if it could rear up and balance like that, the energy expenditure vs calorific gain seems like a losing proposition. You're talking about raising the center of gravity of it's 40-ton body mass by 10-20 feet just to grab a very small mouthful of low calorific leaves. I'd guess the reason the sauropods had an extra long neck was rather so they could AVOID moving as much as possible - stand in one place and just swivel neck around to graze a large area.

w10-1 4mo ago
If they could eat from higher branches than others, they could avoid competition for resources.
- HarHarVeryFunny 4mo ago
  Sure, but they wouldn't routinely be doing it unless a) it was possible, and b) there was an actual benefit - they gained more calories per rear than they expended doing it.
throwup238 4mo ago
That’s an ongoing debate within paleontology that often takes place on a species by species basis. The argument goes that since diplodocids (which this species is not) had heavy muscular tails, their center of gravity was near their hips, making it easy to rear up since they were effectively already a balanced seesaw and could use the tail as a third point of contact to balance. Species in Mamenchisaurus share similar pelvic and tail features and M. youngi was show to have a stiff neck that couldn’t lift very easily, so it’s inferred that these may have reared as well. There are center of mass and skeletal models and stuff to determine whether rearing is possible but one hasn’t been made for this species specifically. Sidenote: you underestimate the cardiovascular cost of pumping blood up a 5-15 meter neck. It’s not at all clear that a rearing strategy is more expensive energy wise. In their case it’s less spending energy to standup than just leaning back to let their skeletal structure and center of mass do the work. Mostly I think this pose is a matter of logistics. They probably just had more vertical space than horizontal to work with for this exhibit. Even though they’re fiberglass, the casts for these guys run well into the tons per skeleton so it can be challenging to mount the armatures in an existing structure and it turns into a game of fossil tetris balanced by the cost of structural support modifications needed (there almost always are for a fossil of this size).

fsckboy 4mo ago

this statement is literally true: this dinosaur has a soar throat.

mankhb2k 4mo ago

if the head falls of, they'll have to take everything apart just to put the head back on

dudeinjapan 4mo ago
meh just put the head on the end of the tail, a lot less effort and no one will be any the wiser.

gibspaulding 4mo ago

It’s really bugging me that whatever software was used to assemble this did some weird AI-ey blending from the lower jaw into the crown moulding.

deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
arjie 4mo ago
[dead]

throw0101d 4mo ago

See also perhaps recent Odd Lots podcast episode "Inside the Booming Market for Dinosaur Fossils": > Two years ago, Citadel's Ken Griffin paid almost $45 million for a stegosaurus skeleton, making it the most expensive fossil ever sold at auction. So why are dinosaur bones joining the collections of millionaires instead of museums? How does the private market for fossils actually work? And how similar is it to the market for art and other antiquities? In this episode, we speak with Salomon Aaron, a director at London-based gallery David Aaron, where he is the gallery's in-house broker for dinosaur fossils. We talk about how fossils are found and priced, what it's like to work alongside dinosaur hunters, how his gallery identifies potential buyers, and why Joe thinks something about the birds-to-dinosaurs evolutionary pipeline is off. * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hf4nv3ggdqE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hf4nv3ggdqE * https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/inside-the-booming-market-for-dinosaur-fossils/id1056200096?i=1000765739904 https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/inside-the-booming-mar... * https://omny.fm/shows/odd-lots/why-dinosaur-fossils-are-selling-for-millions-of-dollars https://omny.fm/shows/odd-lots/why-dinosaur-fossils-are-sell...

camillomiller 4mo ago

“Genuinely”. Did you have to write the headline with an LLM? Or you genuinely chose to use the most abused-by-LLMs adverb in the entire English vocabulary?

evanklem2004 4mo ago
its a dinosaur pic bruh chill
gota 4mo ago
The blog post is clearly human written. One minor signal in the title is nothing and should not, I think, offend anyone to the point it seems to have offended you. Besides, I refuse to accept that we are now meant to police ourselves and our use of language because AI copies it. Write the way you write, it will be apparent in your text (as it is for the author), and we'll deal with the unfortunate few cases in which a false-positive signal (like 'genuinely' in this title) the correct way: completely ignoring it

adonovan 4mo ago

How many parts is this skeleton disassembled into in transit? Each bone? Crazy project!

shmeeed 4mo ago

I find the post mostly notable for its dry humour. :) The picture itself... let's just say, my smartphone as of 2017 could have produced this vertical panorama all by itself in much less time than nine years, and without the help of an Emmy-award-winning SE specialist - albeit at lower resolution, meaning it wouldn't make a good print. So it was worth it in the end!