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I stumbled accross something big in the Morrison.
Here’s ReBecca Hunt-Foster, Monument Paleontologist for Dinosaur National Monument, long-time collaborator/client and person who got me involved in field paleontology, next to it for scale, while it’s still in the ground:

For those of you who like measurements, it’s 201 cm long. Aka about 6 feet 7 inches. It’s really goddamn big. And even more goddamn rare.

Turns out, our Brachisoaurus is only the 11th specimen of this famous dinosaur ever found. And they’re all really incomplete.

I’ve been working around the clock for the past two months trying to finish my documentary on the Morrison Formation “Jurassic Reimagined”, spurred on by today’s coming press release. Between the difficulty of telling the complex story of the Morrison and the surprising diversity of other creatures we found in the Morrison’s Salt Wash Member (this is just the biggest) finishing all the parts of the doc by today in a coherent and compelling way proved impossible. But that’s a pretty good problem to have, and I look forward to sharing the full story of this Brachiosaurus’ discovery and excavation, along with the discovery of numerous other dinosaurs and other clues about the ancient environment of the Morrison they all lived in. For now here’s a few pictures and images as an early look.

Brachiosaurus #11 with Wes Bartlett, Darla the Clydesdale and his son Kobin for scale.

This Brachiosaurus was found while surveying in the Morrison of Utah with Matt Wedel and Thuat Tran. For more sneak peaks about what we found nearby, check out Matt Wedel’s blog SVPOW.

The excavation was made possible by a joint effort between Matt Wedel/Western University of Health Sciences, John Foster/the Utah Field House of Natural History in vernal Utah, myself, Dinosaur National Monument paleontologist ReBecca Hunt-Foster, paleontologist Yara Haridy, my friends Casey Cordes and Mallerie Niemann, and – without a doubt the most important segment of the workforce – the Bartlett family from Naples Utah and their two Clydesdale horses Molly and Darla.

When we got it back to the Utah Field House of Natural History (where you can now see it on display) the bone in the jacket weighed 1012 lbs. It was probably a few pounds heavier when we were actually getting it out though because the plaster was still damp.

The most complete humerus of Brachiosaurus.

Funding to hire the Bartletts on with their horses came from the Friends of the Utah Field House group in Vernal Utah. Absolutely every member of this team and every bit of equipment and ingenuity went into this difficult extraction. Because the bone was found in sensitive desert habitat in a remote gulch on Utah State land, we couldn’t take vehicles out to the site. The site isn’t terribly easy to hike to without a thousand pounds of fossils, so the engineering and logistics of extracting something that big proved fairly daunting. But (somehow) we (barely) pulled it off, and we documented every step of the way.

I can’t wait to show you.

In case you missed it, Jurassic Reimagined part 1 is here:

I am exceedingly happy and relieved to announce that Jurassic Reimagined part 1 is finally done.

Since releasing it few people were interested in seeing some of the visuals a bit longer, and wanted more information about the Carnegie Quarry and the strat column. Here is my illustration of the major Brushy Basin large dino lineages:

And here is a frame of ReBecca in the Quarry surrounded by an astonishing abundance and diversity of dead dinosaurs. The main takeaway here is that this was a remarkably productive ecology. Behold yall.

If you’d like to see the full quarry map (albeit sadly unlabeled by species) you can see that on Matt Wedel’s blog Sauropod Vertebra Picture of The Week (SVPOW).

Originally we planned on doing this documentary as two parts, but it became clear in editing that the story was more digestible and the complicated post-production process more manageable if it were broken into three parts. So, this part 1 is a bit shorter than the other parts will be, but I hope it helps people understand and appreciate the Morrison on a foundational level that will hopefully give significance to the forthcoming parts 2 and 3. Unfortunately breaking the first video into two parts meant that I needed to regroup and re-record narration, as well as generate some more art, sound and motion graphics to clarify the story, and subsequent refinement, hence the various delays.

I am aiming to realease part 2 toward the end of the month, but I have been consistently humbled by the challenge of trying to tell the complex story of the Morrison and it’s ecology of giant dinosaurs. The incredibly time consuming task of editing and refining and modifying the immense volume of footage we’ve shot over the last five years has proven exponentially more time consuming a process than I was used to dealing with, and that added to the already time consuming task of creating motion graphics and original music to augment that footage has proven a really complex and somewhat overwhelming task, so please bear with me.

Ultimately though, this project has been delayed numerous times in large part because the time I’ve spent in the Morrison has been a perspective-altering experience, and it has made me determined to try and tell the complicated story of the Morrison and express the feelings that story gives me as best as I can. The history of life on our planet is recorded in the geology at a scope and on a time scale that is truly unfathomable, and yet in that vastness there are the countless stories of living beings, our fellow earth creatures recorded in the stone. This documentary is my feeble effort to exalt those distant kind and our living planet of which we are an inextricable part. I hope that comes through more than anything.

I hope you like it. My collaborators and I are excited to share with you what we’ve been working on.