Documenting Skeletal Mounts

Post DinoCon, Matt is staying at my house, and we are trying hard to push out some science. This morning as he tried to innocently drink his coffee, I bombarded him with a passage from Taylor et al. (2025:87–88), read out loud. Instead of telling me to shut up and go away, he suggested I post it verbatim here. So here we go. The mounted skeleton of Giraffatitan brancai, based on its paralectotype specimen MB.R.2181 (then “Brachiosaurus” brancai HMN S II) was unveiled in August 1937. With understandable delays due to World War II, Werner Janensch (1950) published his account of the mount 13 years later, specifying which elements were from the paralectotype, which had been filled in from other comparable specimens, and which were sculpted and at what scales. The Berlin museum’s atrium was renovated and its skeletons remounted in 2005–2007, and the revised Giraffatitan mount unveiled in 2007; only four years later, Remes et al. (2011) gave a comprehensive account of the remount.…