Nov. 14, 2007 -- A massive skeleton of the dinosaur Barosaurus has been found by Royal Ontario Museum paleontologists who were digging around in their museum's own collections, according to an announcement made by officials there this week.
The entire assembled skeleton will measure around 80 feet in length, with individual bones weighing upwards of 200 pounds. During its lifetime, the dinosaur would have weighed as much as 15 tons.
When mounted and exhibited December 15, the Barosaurus will be the largest dinosaur on display in Canada. It will also be the only Barosaurus in the world comprised of mostly actual bone (instead of bone casts) mounted in a realistic pose.
The discovery pleasantly shocked David Evans, the museum's new associate curator of vertebrate paleontology. One of his first assignments was to find a sauropod for display in the museum's new Age of Dinosaurs gallery. For months he investigated purchasing a cast replica or even digging one up in Wyoming, which would have been expensive and time-consuming.
While on a plane to Wyoming to do just that, he happened to read an article by sauropod expert Jack McIntosh that referenced a Barosaurus skeleton at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM).
"I wanted to turn the plane around," Evans told Discovery News. "As soon as we had a stopover in Denver, I frantically e-mailed contacts at the Carnegie Museum, which traded, among other things, two duck-billed dinosaur skeletons for what turned out to be our Barosaurus. This was in the 1960's."
Long forgotten, the sauropod wound up scattered all over the ROM's collections room.
"When I got back to Ontario, staff and I searched for hours, finding half of its femur on a shelf, the other half in a drawer, with still other bones in boxes that we previously thought belonged to multiple dinosaur individuals," Evans explained. "It was like conducting field work right in our own museum!"
The Barosaurus was originally excavated at Dinosaur National Monument in Utah. It lived during the Late Jurassic around 150 million years ago. The creature's name means "heavy lizard," referring to its huge neck bones, long neck and tail. The plant eater appears to have been restricted to the Morrison Formation, a sequence of sedimentary rock found in the western United States and Canada.
"No big sauropods were ever collected in Canada," Evans clarified. "We're mostly famous for our Cretaceous period, Alberta-region dinosaurs, like T. rex, Triceratops, Parasaurolophus (a duck-billed dino), and Centrosaurus," which had a nose horn and small hornlets on a frill.
The American Museum of Natural History is the only other major museum in the world to have a Barosaurus on display.
AMNH spokesman Ken Kostel told Discovery News that their dino went up around 20 years ago. The dinosaur is shown in a dramatic pose, rearing on its hind legs with its neck stretched high. The New York museum's website admits the pose "is a product of the human imagination."
The problem is that researchers now doubt the dino, with its 39-foot neck, could have pumped sufficient blood to the beast's tiny head, if the animal were to have held its neck in an upright position.
Roger Seymour, an Adelaide University Department of Environmental Biology researcher, said the left ventricle alone from the heart would had to have weighed over 4,400 pounds to pump the blood, if Barosaurus were a warm-blooded dinosaur. Even if it had been cold blooded, its metabolism would have needed to be ultra low to maintain a vertical neck.
When the Barosaurus makes its public debut this December, sharing space with T. rex, Triceratops and Stegasaurus skeletons, it will be shown with its neck in a horizontal position, making its enormous body size seem all the lengthier.
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American Museum of Natural History