Documenting Skeletal Mounts

Post DinoCon, Matt is staying at my house, and we are trying hard to push out some science. This morning as he tried to innocently drink his coffee, I bombarded him with a passage from Taylor et al. (2025:87–88), read out loud. Instead of telling me to shut up and go away, he suggested I post it verbatim here. So here we go.

The mounted skeleton of Giraffatitan brancai, based on its paralectotype specimen MB.R.2181 (then “Brachiosaurus” brancai HMN S II) was unveiled in August 1937. With understandable delays due to World War II, Werner Janensch (1950) published his account of the mount 13 years later, specifying which elements were from the paralectotype, which had been filled in from other comparable specimens, and which were sculpted and at what scales. The Berlin museum’s atrium was renovated and its skeletons remounted in 2005–2007, and the revised Giraffatitan mount unveiled in 2007; only four years later, Remes et al. (2011) gave a comprehensive account of the remount.

Unfortunately, such published documentation is the exception rather than the rule, and the composition of many important sauropod mounts remains essentially undocumented. For example, in Matthew’s (1905) nine-page account of the American Museum of Natural History’s newly mounted Brontosaurus, only half a page is dedicated to summarizing the actual fossil material included. Little is known about the Yale Peabody Museum’s Brontosaurus excelsus mount based on the holotype YPM 1980, beyond extracts of Lull’s terse account reproduced by Schuchert and LeVene (1940) and then by Padian (1978). Over time, primary documentation is lost, memories fade, and the principals retire or die. There is no way now to ask Hatcher or Holland what was the source of the left ilium, femur, and tibia in the Carnegie Diplodocus mount; nor, in relation to a mounted skeleton erected only 30 years ago, to ask John McIntosh about the choices made in creating the rearing Barosaurus in the rotunda of the American Museum of Natural History.

We recognize that dinosaur mount renovations are intense projects, often executed under ambitious schedules, and typically overseen by scientists who have numerous other responsibilities competing for their attention. One of us (Lamanna) was the scientist in charge of the 2005–2007 renovation of the Carnegie Museum’s dinosaur galleries, and says without reservation that this was the most demanding project he has ever been involved in. Had those involved in the Diplodocus remount realized at the time that the decisions they made would be important for posterity, they would have kept running notes, material lists, and a correspondence archive.

Every mounted dinosaur skeleton is an important scientific and historical artifact: those of large and generally incomplete dinosaurs such as sauropods arise from complex scientific and political processes involving myriad controversies and decisions. We urge those who have the privilege of working on them to write up their choices for publication before memories evaporate and records are lost.

References

• Taylor, Michael P., Amy C. Henrici, Linsly J. Church, Ilja Nieuwland and Matthew C. Lamanna. 2025. The history and composition of the Carnegie Diplodocus. Annals of the Carnegie Museum 91(1):55–91. doi: 10.2992/007.091.0104