Re: Stegosaurus fossil mounted for display at Natural History Museum in London

[Ralph Chapman <ralphchapman@earthlink.net>]

We sure seem to have come a long way in our reconstruction of stegosaurs. I 
grew up going to the Peabody Museum about 15 miles from my house and the stego 
mount there suffered from  overly-long-femur "disease" and looked like it was 
about to start a 100 m. dash. They mounted it with what they had, much as the 
Triceratops at the NMNH had duckbill feet and mis-matched-humerus "disease".

As a result, as a youngster, the stego never seemed to be as much a real animal 
as many of the other dinos in that same hall, or the great mounts at the AMNH 
where I had less of a reaction, but still was unhappy with the classic mount. 
The NMNH stego mount was also better in some ways, but still never really 
seemed as much a real animal to me compared with the allosaur, ceratopsians, 
and sauropods there.

I have always thought the first stegosaur mount that looked like a real animal 
to my eyes was Ken's (Carpenter) elegant reconstruction in Denver - and it is 
still my favorite stego mount. I would be interested to know what other great 
and realistic stego mounts are out there and when they went up relative to 
Ken's mount. Obviously there is now a great one in London, but I would think it 
would be great to see a study just on the evolution of the stegosaur mount 
(probably exists now that I think about it, so a pointer to it would be 
appreciated). 

I did a lot of looking at mounts when we worked on the new Triceratops mount at 
NMNH in the late 1990's. It was interesting to see the first mount - at NMNH - 
was far superior to most anything that followed for a long time.

Anyway, would appreciate hearing thoughts on this from the esteemed group.


Ralph E. Chapman
Paleontologist & Technologist
New Mexico Virtualization LLC and Los Alamos Business Incubation LLC
102 El Morro St.
Los Alamos, NM 87544
USA
(505) 672-2240 [Home]
(505) 500-5266 [cell]
ralphchapman@earthlink.net


-----Original Message-----
>From: Ben Creisler <bcreisler@gmail.com>
>Sent: Nov 15, 2014 1:00 PM
>To: dinosaur@usc.edu
>Subject: Stegosaurus fossil mounted for display at Natural History Museum in 
>London
>
>Ben Creisler
>bcreisler
>
>Real fossil skeleton of Stegosaurus stenops mounted for the Natural
>History Museum in London; with time-lapse video of assembly:
>
>
>http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/dinosaurs/11231863/Worlds-most-complete-stegosaurus-unveiled-by-Natural-History-Museum.html
>
>Blog:
>
>http://newviewsonoldbones.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/plates-spikes-and-brain-size-of-plum.html