The mounted skeleton of Patagotitan at the AMNH

Click to titanosaurize. Trust me.

I was in Philadelphia a couple of weeks ago to work with Liguo Li, of Yongjinglong fame, and I took a day to run up to New York for a quick day’s work at the American Museum of Natural History. It was my first time visiting since the cast skeleton of Patagotitan went up, so it was my first chance to see that beast in the flesh (so to speak). The pano up top is mine, but the other two photos here are by Liguo. I’m writing with my thoughts on the mount.

Pros:

• It’s big.
• You can walk all the way around it, with no glass in the way.
• It’s very convincing. The casting job on the real elements is superb, with all of the cracks and so on faithfully recorded. And the vertebrae they had to sculpt look pretty good.
• The spotlights aimed at the neck cast these immense shadows of the cervical vertebrae on the far wall, which is cool (see below).
• Now the AMNH has mounted skeletons of Brontosaurus (or some apatosaurine at any rate), Barosaurus, Kaatedocus (masquerading as a juvenile Barosaurus in the rotunda), and Patagotitan – that’s pretty not bad. I’m hard pressed to think of another museum in the Western Hemisphere with so many mounted sauropod skeletons. Carnegie, maybe? Someone help me out, here.

Cons:

• In striking contrast to the well-lit, mostly-white aesthetic of the rest of the fossil halls, the orientation gallery holding Patagotitan is mostly in near-Stygian darkness. Shoot in HDR mode if you can.
• The head poking out into the hallway is a nice trick (see also: Sauroposeidon at the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History), but it means that one of the focal bits of the animal is in a different lighting regime, which makes photography even trickier than it might otherwise have been.
• The mount feels a bit…cramped by the geometry of the room. Of the AMNH mounted sauropods, it’s easily in the worst space. If you ask me, they should have dethroned Barosaurus from the rotunda (religious commitments notwithstanding) and put Patagotitan there. The Patagotitan mount that is going in Stanley Field Hall at the Field Museum is going to look much more impressive just because of the setting.

In all, not bad, could be better. It was fun for me because the longest cervicals of Sauroposeidon are veeerrry slightly longer than the longest of Patagotitan, and now that Sauroposeidon is coming out as a titanosaur in most analyses…it might have been friggin’ immense.

So, yeah, go see Patagotitan, and all the other good stuff on display at the AMNH.

For more posts on Patagotitan, see:

• Don’t believe the hype: Patagotitan was not bigger than Argentinosaurus
• Some further thoughts on Patagotitan