Largest sauropods

[Deleted]

Sept 24, 2014 10:15:43 GMT 5 blaze said:

Have you seen this? I had not realized how awful that reconstruction is.

What is this reconstruction supposed to be of?

[theropod]

That’s a skeletal mount of Argentinosaurus from here→.

[Deleted]

Sept 24, 2014 16:31:36 GMT 5 theropod said:

That’s a skeletal mount of Argentinosaurus from here→.

How in the freaking world did that thing even pass the peer review?

...who even designed that mount?

Is finding or even contacting qualified palaeontological advisers really that hard?

[theropod]

Because of this→ and this→.

Coria was "behind the first physical reconstruction", but I’m not sure whether that refers to the mount.
www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/10/131030125538.htm

I don’t think they have a lack of qualified palaeontological advisers, but sometimes qualification is not enough to restore a good skeleton. For starters, skeletal mounts are made for exhibition, not necessarily accuracy (that even affects virtually complete skeletons), so what is to be expected from an animal known from only 10% of its bones?
That they are going to try and visualize something for the general public that is good enough that 10-year-olds usually won’t complain, or that they are going to produce a scientifically accurate skeletal reconstruction similar to Hartman’s drawings?
That’s sad, but it’s normal. What I find much more tragic is that they then use this sort of mount as a basis for a scientific study (which should indeed have the aim of accuracy first and foremost) without making corrections. They could have found other reasonably large AND reasonably complete sauropod skeletons which would have given them much more valuable data, or they could have themselves produced a rigorous reconstruction digitally.
Their intentions were good enough, but the usage of that skeleton ruined the whole thing.

[Deleted]

Sept 24, 2014 17:57:13 GMT 5 theropod said:

Because of this→ and this→.

Coria was "behind the first physical reconstruction", but I’m not sure whether that refers to the mount.
www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/10/131030125538.htm

I don’t think they have a lack of qualified palaeontological advisers, but sometimes qualification is not enough to restore a good skeleton. For starters, skeletal mounts are made for exhibition, not necessarily accuracy (that even affects virtually complete skeletons), so what is to be expected from an animal known from only 10% of its bones?
That they are going to try and visualize something for the general public that is good enough that 10-year-olds usually won’t complain, or that they are going to produce a scientifically accurate skeletal reconstruction similar to Hartman’s drawings?

I would expect them to get some data on the bones first, then let someone like
Nima or Scott Hartman or someone similarly qualified and skilled draw up the design schematics for this thing and
then build it based on the design.

What I find much more tragic is that they then use this sort of mount as
a basis for a scientific study (which should indeed have the aim of
accuracy first and foremost) without making corrections. They could have
found other reasonably large AND reasonably complete sauropod skeletons
which would have given them much more valuable data, or they could have
themselves produced a rigorous reconstruction digitally.
Their intentions were good enough, but the usage of that skeleton ruined the whole thing.

Sorry, I couldn't see much good intentions, or couldn't tell the difference between it and just plain ignorance, after they used such an inaccurate skeletal. They way they fleshed it out isn't better at all.

Seriously, this is almost as bad as Therrien and Henderson's nonsense!

This is how they should have done it:

> Digitally scan actual Argentinosaurus bones, just the actual ones, not reconstructed
> Get a Scott Hartman-like guy or at least a Nima-like one to design it
> Model the rest of the skeleton based on rigorous scientific reconstruction
> Flesh it out like an actual animal and NOT like how you would put armor on a robotic frame
> and then do the rest of the study with the result

Now that would be an actual rigorous study!

[blaze]

They way they fleshed it out is not new, convex hulling doesn't produce pretty models but they are good enough, laser scanning a mount that big is very time consuming and expensive, what kind of bad intentions would they have? their bias against sauropods, trying to show the world that they were slowpokes?

What you are suggesting they should have done would have put on them the accuracy of the reconstruction and increased the time and money needed to finish the study. They were just misguided in using that horrible reconstruction but that's it.

[creature386]

I am honest, I would not have seen how atrocious it is if you guys hadn't said so (I only would have noticed the exaggerated length).
But this is not so important. It is really a sad that they put so much effort into this an wrote a whole paper (which was mostly about how they created the skeleton) just for creating a reconstruction based on ignorance.

EDIT: I haven't seen blaze's post, looks like this was not a lot of effort when compared to how it would have looked accurately.

[Deleted]

Sept 24, 2014 20:29:23 GMT 5 blaze said:

They way they fleshed it out is not new, convex hulling doesn't produce pretty models but they are good enough, laser scanning a mount that big is very time consuming and expensive, what kind of bad intentions would they have? their bias against sauropods, trying to show the world that they were slowpokes?

What you are suggesting they should have done would have put on them the accuracy of the reconstruction and increased the time and money needed to finish the study. They were just misguided in using that horrible reconstruction but that's it.

Umm, they used that model to estimate mass, obviously no creature is gonna have a flesh outline like that unless it's dead, mummified, and scavenged. It doesn't even have space for the sternum, or that muscle(s) which connects the dinosaur's leg to it's tail(what's the name of that muscle again?)

Okay, maybe I am being too harsh, but the good intentions of the study is clearly overshadowed by it's mistake. You want to get how giant sauropods walked and such? Try using a real sauropod, well, a rigorous reconstruction of a real sauropod.

Many people are going to take that model in face value simply because it appears in a peer-reviewed paper, I'm sure of it. Along with whatever inaccurate(because they were based on an inaccurate model!) figures they have there.

Yes, it would require more resources but it would greatly increase the quality of the results. The entire point of a scientific study is to get quality results for the scientific community along with all those interested. Their reference is basically something that is not Argentinosaurus, but a fictional creature of the same name!

That is not what anyone with a good knowledge on dinosaur reconstructions would call a high quality study.

[blaze]

Good thing that overall body mass doesn't have that much of an effect on the study they were doing.
From the paper.

We do know how much soft tissue was associated with the skeletal segments and these estimates are means based on a limited dataset of modern animals. However we also know that the choice of mass parameters has relatively little effect on experimental [55] or simulation outcomes [33], [56].

And as I said convex hulling is good enough, being off by a couple of tonnes will not greatly affect their results.

It seems it'll mostly affect the energy requirements, still, since they based it on such an inaccurate reconstruction that also affects their results but they do recognize it in some length.

The model relies heavily on the full body skeletal reconstruction and more work needs to be done on other, more complete sauropod specimens to confirm any findings.

[creature386]

How about the way they reconstruct the leg musculature? I looked at the tibia in the reconstruction and it looks like it is basically only separated by skin from the world outside.

[theropod]

@broly: Musculus caudofemoralis longus.
And no, there really doesn’t seem to be enough flesh in that region, but in exchange the neck is ridiculously deep due to the inaccurate cervical rib articulation, and the tail is still way too long.

[Deleted]

Sept 24, 2014 23:59:55 GMT 5 theropod said:

@broly: Musculus caudofemoralis longus.

Oh, thanks for jogging my memory.

Okay guys, I think we can all agree that this model is one of the worst. It doesn't even really look like a titanosauriform at all.

[blaze]

creature386
The convex hulling did gave it skinny limbs but they didn't use that for the musculature in the locomotion model.

@brolyeuphyfusion
Not this model per se, they didn't make it is just a scan of the mount in the Museo Carmen Funes, which I agree is one of the worst mounts around. Knowing this I think you should retract questioning the quality of the peer-review of this paper, the paper itself is not of poor quality.

[Deleted]

Sept 25, 2014 0:29:20 GMT 5 blaze said:

creature386
The convex hulling did gave it skinny limbs but they didn't use that for the musculature in the locomotion model.

@brolyeuphyfusion
Not this model per se, they didn't make it is just a scan of the mount in the Museo Carmen Funes, which I agree is one of the worst mounts around. Knowing this I think you should retract questioning the quality of the peer-review of this paper, the paper itself is not of poor quality.

Ok, maybe the paper had somewhat higher quality that I suspected but it still bases it's data on what can basically be considered a fictional sauropod.

[theropod]

blaze doesn't doubt that, he was the one to note it in the first place.