Re: STEGOSAUR TAILS (WAS DUCKBILL NECKS)

["Allan Edels" <edels@email.msn.com>]

Having known Ken briefly (and renewing our acquaintance at DinoFest - again
briefly) when he was setting up 'Discovering Dinosaurs' in DInosaur Hall
here at ANSP(1986), I know that he would like to see certain dinosaurs in
certain poses - but when he knows that the bones won't fit - he won't force
them.  As an example, he apparently wanted the _Chasmosaurus belli_ mount to
show an active, near-galluping gait (at least to look that way), and wanted
the forelimbs to be fully-erect, with no sprawling at the elbows.  In order
to put the bones together, and not have the animal constantly bruise itself
in the ribs, he had to mount the forelimbs with a mild outward bend at the
elbows.  In orther words, Ken has his own opnions about how dinosaurs should
look, but he mounts the bones the way they fit.  This is the HONEST way to
reconstruct skeletons.

    Allan Edels


-----Original Message-----
From: Brian Franczak <franczak@ntplx.net>
To: dinosaur@usc.edu <dinosaur@usc.edu>
Date: Thursday, September 03, 1998 3:54 PM
Subject: Re: STEGOSAUR TAILS (WAS DUCKBILL NECKS)


>Peter Von Sholly wrote:
>>
>> Brian, as always you make good, well constucted arguments but still I say
>> phooey on these lifted tails.  Since when are in situ fossils necessarily
>> placed the way the animals were in life?  Let's have all dinosaurs walk
>> around with their necks pulled back over their torsos.  There are lots of
>> in situ skeletons like that.
>
>Not a valid argument. First, if Ken Carpenter tells me that the tail
>stood out straight from the hips of _Stegosaurus_, then I trust that
>he's capable of discerning whether it was in this position because of
>post-death distortion or not. This is not a matter of "artistic
>license", this is a determination by a respected paleontologist.
>
>Then, of course, there is the evidence of such ligamental contraction in
>the tails of sauropods (the juvenile _Camarasaurus_ comes to mind),
>_Struthiomimus_, _Compsognathus_, _Archaeopteryx_, and _Sinosauropteryx_
>(just to name a handful). In all these instances, the tail does *not*
>articulate straight out from the pelvis, but is pulled up in the same
>(if not quite as extreme) distorted manner as the neck and skull.
>Looking at these examples, why would stegosaur tails be straight and not
>similarly bent if that was what was happening to them?
>
>Brian (franczak@ntplx.net)
>http://www.paleolife-art.com
>