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Submitted: March 15
Image Size: 1.8 MB
Resolution: 7296×2236
Submitted with: Sta.sh

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Something Super this way comesby *ScottHartman

Digital Art / Drawings & Paintings / Illustrations / Technical

Ah, Supersaurus. I spent so...much...time with this beast when I was at the WDC that I actually hadn't bothered to do anything with it from 2006 until 2011, when I made some minor revisions for a project that Nature did on gigantism in sauropods. Anyhow, inspired by questions raised over at SVPOW [link] I went ahead and finished revising it. The bones didn't need any tweaking, but their position and the soft-tissue sure did.

A lot happens in 7 years apparently. Anyhow, the WDC specimen of Supersaurus clocks in at 32m in length, with a 12m long neck. Volumetric mass estimates placed it in the 30-35 tonne range, although it wouldn't hurt to redo them just to double check (or I could do a double integration, if I update the multi-view skeletals I did of this guy). The BYU specimen, which is the type (but much less complete) specimen was larger yet, possibly a diplodocid that exceeded 40 meters, and could easily have hit the 40-50 tonne range (note that in our paper we disregarded many of the popular mass estimates for sauropods that produced estimates of 50-80 tonnes for Brachiosaurus, or the big Diplodocus specimen that was named Seismosaurus).

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~Brouwer28 Apr 19, 2013

Hey isn't an estimate of 40-50 tonnes too low if the large one is indeed 40m long and the small one 32m? Isometric scaling would suggest 60 tonnes.

*ScottHartman Apr 19, 2013 Professional Digital Artist

If it is indeed 40m, yes.

~Brouwer28 Apr 24, 2013

How long is it actually?

*ScottHartman Apr 25, 2013 Professional Digital Artist

With so little of the vertebral column known there's no way to answer that question with any precision. Personally I suspect it's closer to 35 meters, but there are plenty of ways you could finagle the numbers to get up to 40m, so we'll just have to find more.

~thediremoose Apr 12, 2013

I remember you and the rest of the WDC crew found Supersaurus to be an apatosaurine, but I've heard that's been challenged. What's your current opinion on it?

Also, it's really a shame that Jim Jensen died before he could have seen the Wyoming specimen.

*ScottHartman Apr 12, 2013 Professional Digital Artist

I still suspect it's an apatosaurine (the tail is a dead-on ringer), but I'm not overly attached to it.

~Afrovenator Mar 30, 2013

Perhaps a weird question: could the height of the dorsal neural spines in sauropods provide an indication for the lever-action of the neck, and to what the degree the neck could be raised above the horizontal? There is quite a bit of variation in the height of this portion of the axial skeleton in sauropod dinosaurs, and all of that would have been covered by muscle, with the apical bifurcation housing both muscle and a tendon. I hope you get what I am trying to get at.. Anyway, thanks in advance for taking the time to answer it!

*ScottHartman Mar 30, 2013 Professional Digital Artist

The height of the dorsal neural spines does speak to the lever arm of any nuchal ligaments that are attached to them and the neck (really just the anterior dorsals here), but the position of the neck plays a large role as well, and that is defined by the articular surfaces more than anything else (although sauropod vertebrae are notoriously susceptible to crushing).

~keesey Mar 18, 2013

Very cool!

Just a note: Scott made a silhouette version and uploaded it to PhyloPic, so now you can see it a fill evolutionary lineage for Supersaurus, including other silhouettes by Scott and other artists - [link]

*ScottHartman Mar 18, 2013 Professional Digital Artist

And you should all go check out PhyloPic, as it really brings some bad-asserry to making family trees.

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