The single biggest please for me finally getting into the Carnegie Museum is the fact that it’s also the first time I’ve been to a museum in the US period. As such, although there are various casts and even specimens floating around the world that I have seen on occasion, this is the first time I’ve actually seen real material or high-quality casts of a great many taxa that are rather fundamental to how we generally perceive dinosaurs. Stegosaurus is a real classic in this sense and just a great animal to see. While I barely work on ornithischians, this was something rather special for me.
If you’re still in Pittsburgh, don’t miss the marvelous Phipps Conservatory, just steps from the Carngie, http://phipps.conservatory.org/, or the Carnegie Museum of Art that is in the same building as the Natural History museum, http://web.cmoa.org/. For beer, you can’t do better than Fathead’s, http://fatheadspittsburgh.com/, a very short cab ride away from the Carnegie. Right now, they have 39 on draft!
I agree about the dinos there. I’m an Ed. Vol. at AMNH and feel we are second to none in fossils but when I visited the Carnegie it was like going from black and white to technicolor – the foliage and the murals are fantastic.
Very nice specimen indeed.
I had never noticed how robust the shoulders and front legs are. Is this just weight-bearing heft or was there another function? Wrestling maybe?
Lol, didn’t you ever read Bakker’s THE DINOSAUR HERESIES? Robust forelimbs most likely evolved to enable the creature to turn around quickly.
It’s been a while… 20 years or more. I vaguely remember the illustration he did of a stegosaur on its hind legs – possibly pushing over a cycad or something. But I’ve not seen a skeleton for myself. I don’t think we have any mounted stegosaurs in the UK… do we?
Bakker portrayed stegosaurs as high feeders, which assumed a tripodal stance to reach high vegetation. Miragaia might support this view, but it’s far from certain.