I have good news and bad news today - the bad news is this is not the post where you get an estimate of the mass of Spinosaurus. I know, I know. And I'm sorry. Here's the good news: in preparation for a much deeper look at the challenges of estimating the mass of Spinosaurus, I've produces far more rigorous mass estimates of Tyrannosaurus and Giganotosaurus from GDI, and I got some surprising results to share.
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Today let's look at another one of our thundering giants, Alamosaurus sanjuanensis. Alamosaurus is known from quite good remains (for a titanosaur), and some fragmentary remains may be close to the largest known dinosaur. How certain is this reconstruction? Much better than Puertasaurus, but there are still a couple of layers of inference needed to get there.
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When I released my Thunder Lizards  size comparison I was asked why a few of the largest animals were rendered in gray, and when I would be making the actual skeletal available. Using gray silhouettes solved an aesthetic concern (the image was threatening to get too busy), but it turns out that those critters have another problem: they are not known from very incomplete remains.

Hello dear readers - I've completely overhauled my we updated my website, so if you haven't been there for awhile I encourage to check it out. I'll be adding more content in the coming days as well (I'm still porting over and updating some of the pages from the previous incarnation). But I also will be incorporating my blog directly onto my site. In the near term I will be cross-posting updates to both Blogger and to the website, but in the medium term I hope you will update your bookmarks to my site instead. If you want more info on the site (and it's history) hop below the fold.
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I don't know if that grabs your attention, but sorting out the size of giant sauropods sure grabs mine. Jump below the fold for some details on the critters in this image.
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I know, it's not exactly an earth-shaking post on anatomy or reconstructing prehistoric life, but as I mop up some of the duties that have taken me away from blogging the last few months I thought I'd share this trailer, which shows off some of what took time away from blogging last year at this time:
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I know it's been a while since I posted anything, and luckily I have a backlog of content to share in the coming weeks, but I'm so excited about this project that I felt I had to post this, if for no other reason than as a warning to artists out there that are thinking about restoring sauropods in the near future.
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Just a quick note, because today we got one of the cooler new papers on dinosaurs to have been published in quite a while, describing not one but three specimens of Ornithomimus with feathers. And not only are there three specimens, but they are of different ages, and it turns out the feathers change as Ornithimimus grows up. In particular, the adults seem to have large wings with branching feathers on them, while the juveniles are covered only with the dinofuzz that we have become familiar with in the Chinese dinosaurs we have come to know and love. This also pulls protowings further down the family tree - prior to this we only had definite wings in those wacky oviraptorids, deinonychosaurs (the various "raptor" dinosaurs), and those critters on the main bird line.
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I haven't been posting much lately, so I thought I'd at least put up this skeletal I finished over the weekend...
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So it turns out I haven't vanished (and actually have a lot of new content to share) but I've been swamped working on several projects of late. One of them I'd like to share, for those of you who really like dinosaurs but actually have different job aspirations:

I'll be teaching a course for Visualarium, one of the leading educational resources for visual effects artists (and artists in training) that use Pixologic ZBrush.
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