[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index][Subject Index][Author Index]

Sauropods



Rahul Daryanani writes:
 > 1. Everyone knows what kind of horror we went through when we saw
 > the Bruhathkayosaurus diagrams. They are PATHETIC, and it's pretty
 > difficult to determine much stuff from them. I was wondering if
 > anyone knows when newer, and hopfeully better papers, are
 > published. I'm asking because Bruhathkayosaurus is a very
 > interesting titanosaurid, exceeding 150 tons in nearly all
 > calculations.

As far as I know, no-one is working on this specimen.  (However, if
you felt like coughing up a few thousand pounds' funding, I'm sure I
could fix that :-)

 > 2. I'm sure that 'Ultrasauros' can never be forgotten. Of course,
 > in the end it was a large Brachiosaurus and Supersaurus. I was
 > wondering how big these two specimens were estimated to be.

The "Ultrasauros" type specimen, a single dorsal vertebra, was
convincingly shown by Curtice et al. (1996) to be not only referrable
to _Supersaurus_ but part of the same specimen that is the holotype of
_Supersaurus_.  (Curtice and Stadtman (2002) went on to show that the
same is true of the _Dystylosaurus_ holotype dorsal vertebra, so that
all three genera were raised on portions of the same individual!)  So
the size of _Supersaurus_ part of "Ultrasauros" was the size of
_Supersaurus_.

The other element referred to "Ultrasauros" was a scapulocoracoid
whose size seems to have been somewhat exaggerated.  It's big,
alright, bigger than any other known brachiosaurid scap, but is
consistent with having belonged to an animals about the same size as
the largest known Tedaguru brachiosaur material, the fibula XV2.  That
makes it about 15% longer than the corresponding elements of the
well-known brachiosaurid specimens FMNH P 25107 (_Brachiosaurus
altithorax_) and HMN SII (_Brachiosaurus brancai_).  If scaling is
isometric, then the "Ultrasauros" scap represented an animal weighing
about 1.15^3 =~ 1.5 times as heavy as those animals.  Assuming a mass
of 35 tonnes for the well-known specimens (don't get me started) that
would give 53 tonnes for the "Ultrasauros" specimen.  Needless to say,
that number shouldn't be taken too seriously -- there are _a lot_ of
ifs, buts and maybes along the way.

 > 3. Both Amphicoelias fragillmus and Bruhathkayosaurus have recieved
 > huge figures of weight in most publications. The newest paper by
 > Ken Carpenter put the former at something like 135 tons (US tons
 > that is), and Bruhathkayosaurus is SUPPOSED to have been even
 > larger. Is it possible for these creatures to actuallly be that
 > big? What is the theoretical limit for the mass of a land animal?

It's fifteen tonnes (Economos 1979) or a thousand tonnes (Hokkanen
1986), or something in between, or somewhat more, or a little less.
That's as much as can be said with certainty.

 _/|_    ___________________________________________________________________
/o ) \/  Mike Taylor    <mike@indexdata.com>    http://www.miketaylor.org.uk
)_v__/\  "St. Augustine [...] came up with the conclusion that the story
         in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 was not a simple historical sequence
         of events.  It just couldn't be.  It's not what the words meant.
         It just wasn't" -- Robert Bakker.