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  • He's got some neck!
  • See also perhaps recent Odd Lots podcast episode "Inside the Booming Market for Dinosaur Fossils":

    > Two years ago, Citadel's Ken Griffin paid almost $45 million for a stegosaurus skeleton, making it the most expensive fossil ever sold at auction. So why are dinosaur bones joining the collections of millionaires instead of museums? How does the private market for fossils actually work? And how similar is it to the market for art and other antiquities? In this episode, we speak with Salomon Aaron, a director at London-based gallery David Aaron, where he is the gallery's in-house broker for dinosaur fossils. We talk about how fossils are found and priced, what it's like to work alongside dinosaur hunters, how his gallery identifies potential buyers, and why Joe thinks something about the birds-to-dinosaurs evolutionary pipeline is off.

    * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hf4nv3ggdqE

    * https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/inside-the-booming-mar...

    * https://omny.fm/shows/odd-lots/why-dinosaur-fossils-are-sell...

  • if the head falls of, they'll have to take everything apart just to put the head back on
  • How many parts is this skeleton disassembled into in transit? Each bone? Crazy project!
  • I find the post mostly notable for its dry humour. :) The picture itself... let's just say, my smartphone as of 2017 could have produced this vertical panorama all by itself in much less time than nine years, and without the help of an Emmy-award-winning SE specialist - albeit at lower resolution, meaning it wouldn't make a good print. So it was worth it in the end!
  • It’s really bugging me that whatever software was used to assemble this did some weird AI-ey blending from the lower jaw into the crown moulding.
  • How can an animal even have a neck that long? Was it clear from the fossils that it is this long because I am skeptical.
  • I've got to wonder how realistic this pose is.

    Even if it could rear up and balance like that, the energy expenditure vs calorific gain seems like a losing proposition. You're talking about raising the center of gravity of it's 40-ton body mass by 10-20 feet just to grab a very small mouthful of low calorific leaves.

    I'd guess the reason the sauropods had an extra long neck was rather so they could AVOID moving as much as possible - stand in one place and just swivel neck around to graze a large area.

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