Genuinely, my all-time favourite image: Mamenchisaurus hochuanensis

Get ready to scroll. In 2017, Wollaton Hall in Nottinghamshire hosted an exhibition, Dinosaurs Of China: Ground Shakers To Feathered Flyers. Wollaton Hall Curator Adam Smith arranged for the SVPCA attendees to visit the exhibition after the conference as a “field trip”. Needless to say, the star of the show for me was the rearing cast skeleton of Mamenchisaurus hochuanensis. But it’s so tall, it’s very hard to photograph well. While we were there, Matt took a a lot of photos of this skeleton, and among them were several sequences showing the Mamenchisaurus from head to tail. Moving with my usual haste, it took me only nine short years to do something with these. And by “do something”, what I mean is “ask someone else to do something”. Specifically, I sent the best sequence to Jarrod Davis, a very old friend of Matt’s and an Emmy-award winning visual effects specialist. And I asked him — as we have done before — to use his skills to stitch the sequence together. The result is the photo…