May 23, 2016

by Mike Taylor

As regular readers will know, Matt and I have recently spent ten glorious days travelling the dinosaur museums of Utah, in a once-in-a-lifetime event that we have been calling the Sauropocalypse. In that time, we visited seven different museums and — this is the truth — had an absolutely fantastic time in all of them. One of the big reasons is of course the quality of their collections and galleries. But equally important is the welcome we got from our hosts at each of these places, and the help they all generously and cheerfully gave us.

Here’s where we visited, in chronological order, with a word of thanks to each host.
1. BYU Museum of Paleontology, Provo

Brooks set us free in his collections and gallery with no restrictions. He had specimens fork-lifted down from high shelves for us, gave us a pallet lifter so we could move them around at will, and generally did everything he could to make our stay productive. He also took us out to lunch, twice: once at a cheap but delicious taco place, and once at a Brazilian eat-all-you-want barbecue place where I could happily have spent the entire afternoon.
2. The Prehistoric Museum, Price

Ken also took us to see the CEUM collections, and invited us to take on a huge descriptive project, working on the PR2 brachiosaur. Sadly, that project is just too big for either of us. But there are individual elements within the PR2 collection that are of interest, and no doubt we’ll be posting more about those, too.
3. Dinosaur National Monument, Jensen

Matt has already paid tribute to Dan Chure, our host up on the wall, who came in on his day off just to help us. An extraordinary host at an astonishing venue.
4. Utah Field House of Natural History, Vernal

Here, we were hosted by Mary Beth Bottomley. She went beyond the call of duty in not only allowing us access to the prep room and collections, but helping us to take apart the shelving in collections so we could get better photos of a big, difficult-to-move specimen. Mary Beth was particularly interested in what we were working on, and will (I hope) now be a regular reader of this blog.
5. Dinosaur Journey, Fruita

We were, inadvertently, sensationally rude to our host, Julia McHugh. She’d arranged to take us for lunch, but Matt was so obsessed with the transit of Mercury across the sun that he completely forgot, and sent me off to get salads from Subway instead. (Note that I am making the point here that Matt forgot this arrangement. I make no comment on my own recall.) As a result, we cheated ourselves out of a BBQ lunch.

But Julia was great about it, and once again we were given free reign in collections. Matt and I were each able to make valuable observations, one for an already-in-progress paper and one for a new one.
6. Natural History Museum of Utah, Salt Lake City

But Carrie was great about it. Rather than resenting our having wasted her time in the collections orientation, she was just glad that we got useful observations out of the museum. (And we did. Matt and I can sometimes get so wrapped up in individual vertebrae that we forget they’re part of whole animals. The many fine mounted dinosaur skeletons at UMNH helped to redress this failing.)
7. North American Museum of Ancient Life, Thanksgiving Point

With no prior notice at all, Rick dropped what he was doing to help us out as we inspected their gorgeous material. That’s been really helpful as we’ve firmed up our ideas on what Barosaurus is. (And I hope we’ve helped them get a better handle on the serial positions of their vertebrae, too.)

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In summary, pretty much everyone we met in Utah was super-helpful and super-nice. That also includes John and ReBecca Foster, who put us up for the night in Moab, the night before we went to Arches National Park. The people are one of three reasons why Utah is now my favourite US state. (The others are the sauropods, naturally, and the landscapes.)

Museum folks of Utah, we salute you!