Henry

@EmuLarge @TomHoltzPaleo It has a nice skull, but I'm more of a fan of the big guys.

@Randomdinos01 @TomHoltzPaleo Could you do Nakonanectes too??

Over 60% of the length of the plesiosaur Albertonectes is made up of its neck, which is the longest relative to body size of any animal ever discovered. At 76, it has more vertebrae in the neck alone than most species have in their entire bodies.

@HappierKindaSad They're warm-blooded predators, so I'd guess not unusually long. Food might take a while to get to the stomach though...

@Randomdinos01 Do we have any estimates of how long it would take for them to digest food??

@nbtapioles Mamenchisaurus hochuanensis has a neck about 47% of body length. Sauroposeidon is too incomplete for that kind of estimate, but Omeisaurus gets up to 50% and so does Xinjiangtitan, having the proportionally longest complete necks of any sauropod.

@Randomdinos01 how do mamenchisaurus and sauroposeidon compare regarding neck to body ?

@marquez_al99630 Each bone was drawn separately; most of them I took from Madsen (1976) - Allosaurus Fragilis: a Revised Osteology, then articulated them and drew over them. The ribs were based on a mounted skeleton at the USNM and the gastralia on Big Al 2 (SMA 0002).

@Randomdinos01 Como es exactamente el proceso? Útilizas fotos de esqueletos montados y dibujas por encima? Es bastante difícil encontrar buenas referencias para allosaurus en general, con el cráneo es más fácil, pero con el cuerpo no encuentro nada útil

A highly versatile predator, Allosaurus was capable of tackling everything from stegosaurs to sauropods to other allosaurs. With some of the most complete individuals being riddled with healed -and unhealed- injuries, theirs was a very dangerous lifestyle, even for a theropod.

@ArtemijAnd42837 This reconstruction follows the interpretation of some ''Alamosaurus'' specimens as lognkosaur relatives (Tykoski & Fiorillo, 2017; Navarro et al., 2022). As no lognkosaur has a skull preserved, Inawentu is the closest reference.

@Randomdinos01 Why you used Inawentu skull and not Nemegtosaurus?

The traditional concept of "Alamosaurus" is now believed to represent multiple different species of large North American titanosaur. Some of these have been suggested to be relatives of South American lognkosaurs like Patagotitan and Puertasaurus, though this is far from certain.

@TM9380 Paul is the first to comment about it in a while, but other teams have similar ideas (most notable to me was a 2018 SVP presentation by John A. Fronimos et al.), albeit unpublished.

@Randomdinos01 Is this in reference to the Gregory S Paul work or something else?

@KellelJhonson @argoncanister I think it's perfectly fine, 326 cm rounds up to 3.3 meters anyway. But if you added cartilage between the limb bones and thicker padding to the feet, then his reconstruction would be a few centimeters taller.

@Randomdinos01 @argoncanister Hey Henry if you don't mind a discussion would you say Joans' original PIN 5551-1 is "outdated" mainly for it's hip height such is just under 4mm from 330? or is that way too small to make a fuss about

While its anatomy is not as thoroughly studied as that of T.rex, well-preserved skeletons in multiple stages of growth allow us to reconstruct the life history of Tarbosaurus much more clearly than its North American cousin's... especially after Zanno & Napoli (2025).

@argoncanister Thanks! 551-1 is tricky to cross-scale because its vertebrae are wide, but very short anteroposteriorly (probably crushed). I wouldn't go below 330 cm in hip height, though.

@Randomdinos01 Nice work. 360 cm tall is much larger than I would normally expect for Tarbosaurus, wonder what its weight would be

@BrunenAlfaro Patagotitan loses approximately 1 meter in length per year, meaning that around 2054, it will cease to exist

@Randomdinos01 Can't believe it's alredy been 9 years since this was published

Starting off 2026 with a remake of one of my oldest works, Patagotitan! Even though it's not the largest, the completeness of its remains makes it one of the most impressive dinosaur discoveries. Seeing a cast of the skeleton in person was absolutely breathtaking.

@WolandtheArtist It's an even more efficient strategy for sauropods, as they are able to process food without chewing - most of an elephant's feeding time is spent chewing, while a sauropod just swallows a mouthful of plants and is free to grab the next one.

@Randomdinos01 I read recently about how elephants need to eat constantly, and use their trunks to keep moving food from their vicinity to their mouth. It just occurred to me sauropods used the same strategy, they just put the mouth at the end of their trunk.

@enfamiliados @cambroraster SMU 74646 has the best-preserved spines, and they are indeed shorter than what I reconstructed, but the holotype of A.atokensis preserves spines along the neck that are much taller than the SMU specimen and fit more closely with Fran's mount. And thank you!

@Randomdinos01 @cambroraster The spines of other specimen of Acrocanthosaurus seem to be more modestly sized though: skeletaldrawing.com/home/2012/01/e… (Impressive skeletal nonetheless)

Merry Christmas! While the genus Acrocanthosaurus is currently only known from a single species, differences in the skull of the largest known specimen suggest that the giant sail-backed carcharodontosaurs may have been more diverse in North America than we thought.

@Tired2D3ath Not for Spinosaurus (it was most certainly a sail), but for Acrocanthosaurus, a big muscular hump is plausible.

@Randomdinos01 Is the meme coming to reality?

@cambroraster None of the dorsal spines are complete, so any reconstruction is speculative. I just took the complete cervical and sacral spines and tried to make a smooth transition between them, but especially the anterior dorsals could have been shorter.

@Randomdinos01 the neural spines seem significantly taller here than most other skeletal reconstructions i've seen, is there any reason for that?

@TM9380 The authors do claim that more study is needed before naming Fran as a new species (hence the =A.atokensis? in the image).

@Randomdinos01 Tbh the paper those supposed differences come up in… I don’t know. I’m not convinced myself

Update: I forgot to fill part of the lacrimal with white, it's not so freakishly thin at the bottom.