Here’s a pair of skulls (well casts I think, but I’m not 100% sure) of the sauropod Camarasaurus. We really are very short of cranial material when it comes to sauropods so to have these and for them to represent both an adult (below) and a pretty small juvenile (above) is even better. In fact they appear, to me at least, surprisingly similar in form with very little in the way of ontogenetic changes to the skull as the animal heads towards adulthood, though of course it’d be nice to have a tiny baby for comparison.
more Camarasaurus head (real, not cast) here:
http://dinosaurpalaeo.wordpress.com/2011/09/20/places-ive-been-dinosaurs-ive-seen-1-2/
I’m wondering: if it is a cast, is the the juvenile really a juvenile, or a scaled down (sub-)adult?
Well I was looking at that earlier actually Heinrich. DOn’t know about the one in your photo either, but I do know there is a near complete juvy out there with a skull. I’m sure one of the SV_POW boys will know the right paper, but I have seen this in the literature.
I’ll go through my pics tonight; I may have seen it.
You’re probably thinking of Gilmore’s specimen, CM 11338?
Gilmore, Charles W. 1925. A nearly complete articulated skeleton of Camarasaurus, a saurischian dinosaur from the Dinosaur National Monument, Utah. Memoirs of the Carnegie Museum 10:347-384.
(Ignore this.)
Do you write something to tell us to ignore it like “this page is left blank” or did you mean to ignore the above comment Mike?
When I left my useful comment, I forgot to check the Email Me When More Comments Are Posted box. And since WordPress only lets you turn that on when you leave a comment, I left a vacuous one for that purpose.
Here’s what I take is a high-quality cast of CM 11338. I took this pic at Dinosaur National Monument, and the labels didn’t have any specimen numbers. This is, however, the skull of a complete skeleton found in 1919.
http://dinosaurpalaeo.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/camara-cm-11338.jpg
Yep, that’s it.
Thanks. I have pics of another cast somewhere, these of the entire animal – but where among my 33 gazillion pics???
Anyone know what specimen the second pic is based on?
And if that’s a cast, it’s a bloody good cast…