Brontomerus Press Pack

21st February 2011

The purpose of this page is to provide images and video that can be used by television and print media. See also the extras page, which contains high-resolution images from the paper itself, the official press release from University College London, and the fact sheet, which also notes some common errors to avoid.

Click on any image for a larger version; see below for image credits, copyrights and permissions.

Brontomerus mcintoshi is a newly discovered dinosaur from the Early Cretaceous of North America. The name Brontomerus means "Thunder thighs" -- a name chosen because the peculiar shape of the hip bone shows that it would have had enormously powerful thigh muscles in life.

Brontomerus is a sauropod: a member of the group of dinosaurs that includes Diplodocus, Aptosaurus and Brachiosaurus. The quarry where the bones were found contains elements from at least two individuals, one of them three times as big as the other -- an adult and a juvenile. In this life restoration, we show the adult as a mother, protecting her baby from a predator by using those powerful thigh muscles to deliver a devastating kick.

Brontomerus is not known from a complete skeleton, but from a selection of bones: some from the shoulder and hip, some ribs, some vertebrae, and some unidentifiable fragments. This photograph shows all of the known material:

And this skeletal inventory shows (in white) which are the known bones. The remaining, grey, bones are filled in from a reconstruction of the well-known related dinosaur, Camarasaurus. The preserved bones are enough to give us a good idea of the size of the adult animal -- rather larger than the biggest modern elephants.

Notice how, in the reconstruction above, the hip bone projects a long way forward from the socket where it meets the leg: in life, muscles would have run down to the leg from the whole length of the hip bone, hence the name "Thunder thighs".

Here is that hip-bone in detail. (Part of the blade is missing due to damage at the quarry, but the intact portion allows the shape to the reconstructed with confidence.)

Here are the authors of the Brontomerus paper with the fossil bones. From left to right: Mike Taylor, Matt Wedel and Rich Cifelli.

The following video presents and discusses some of the ideas in the paper and uses some of the illustrations.

Two of the paper's authors, Mike Taylor and Matt Wedel, run a suprisingly popular blog called Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week, or SV-POW! for short, at svpow.wordpress.com. Much more discussion of Brontomerus will appear there in the week after publication, as was the case with their paper last year on the habitual neck-posture of sauropods.

Reference

The scholarly paper that names and describes Brontomerus is:

• Taylor, Michael P., Mathew J. Wedel and Richard L. Cifelli. 2011. Brontomerus mcintoshi, a new sauropod dinosaur from the Lower Cretaceous Cedar Mountain Formation, Utah, USA. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 56(1):75-98. doi: 10.4202/app.2010.0073 [PDF]

Image and video credits, copyrights and permissions

• The life restoration (both images and the video) was executed by Francisco Gascó under the direction of Mike Taylor and Matt Wedel, and may be freely reproduced so long as Gascó is credited.
• The skeletal reconstruction was executed by Mike Taylor based on a reconstruction of Camarasaurus by Scott Hartman, and may be freely reproduced so long as Hartman is credited.
• The photograph of all the recovered bones, and that of the hip bone, were taken by Mike Taylor and may be freely reproduced with no conditions.
• The photograph of the authors with the fossils was taken by Linda Coldwell, and cleaned up by Jarrod Davis, and may be freely reproduced with no conditions.
• The video of the author explaining the new dinosaur in the Grant Museum of Comparative Zoology was filmed and edited by Rob Eagle for UCL. It may be freely used, excepted, etc., so long as UCL is cited as the source of the video and the speaker is credited as Dr. Mike Taylor, UCL Department of Earth Sciences.