Concrete Diplodocus exhibition at the Price Prehistoric Museum

Brian Curtice, a long-time sauropod jockey who now runs Fossil Crates, was briefly in Price, Utah, last Friday to drop off an Eilenodon skull at the Prehistoric Museum. While he was there he snapped some photos of a new “Dippy” exhibition — reproduced here with permission.

The entrance to the exhibition. Unfortunately the sign obscures much of what’s beyond (and what is it with this ridiculous nickname “Dippy”? Come on! Give this animal some dignity.) But it does show that there are a lot of elements on display, including the dorsal sequence (to the left), the proximal tail (to the right) and a hindfoot (bottom right, partly obscured by the pillar).

All these elements are of course the concrete casts made in 1957 by the Untermanns and their colleagues at the Utah Field House of Natural History in Vernal. They have been really nicely restored, as other photos show.

A complete set of right-sided dorsal ribs:

A probably proximal humerus and coalesced tradius/ulna pair:

I won’t labour the point, but there’s also a full hindlimb — femur, tib/fib, astragalus, pes — whiplash tail (last 30 or so caudals) and quite possibly more than Brian didn’t get photos of.

Of course, the museum is keen to find a way to mount these concrete bones, but the irony is that right now, having all those cast elements on display in a well-lit hall makes this possibly the world’s most informative exhibit of sauropod osteology. If you want to see how morphology changes along the first ten caudals, for example, this is going to be so much easier to access than the original Carnegie Museum material, up way above head-height in its mount.

Anyway: the other great thing about this exhibit is the signage. There is a lot of it — Brian sent photos of 40 or so panels, with accessible but informative text and plenty of historic photos.

But the most gratifying thing for me about the signage is that evidently a lot of it was drawn from material in our paper The Concrete Diplodocus of Vernal (Taylor et al. 2023), including for example this section on what happened to the original molds:

I love the idea that our paper is now out there reaching regular people and helping to tell the fascinating story of that concrete dinosaur.

I’d love to visit it myself, if it’s there long enough.

References

• Taylor, Michael P., Steven D. Sroka and Kenneth Carpenter. 2023. The Concrete Diplodocus of Vernal — a Cultural Icon of Utah. Geology of the Intermountain West 10:65-91. doi: 10.31711/giw.v10.pp65-91