A unique sauropod mount: Haplocanthosaurus delfsi CMNH 10380

Hatcher (1903a) gave a very brief description — two pages and no illustrations — of the new sauropod Haplocanthus, basing it and its type species H. priscus on the adult specimen CM 572. Later that year, having been notified that the genus name was preoccupied by a fish, he renamed it Haplocanthosaurus in a single-paragraph note (Hatcher 1903b).

Then in his monographic description later that same year (Hatcher 1903c), he also named a second species, H. utterbacki, based on the subadult specimen CM 879. McIntosh and Williams (1988:22) considered this to be synonymous with H. priscus, the differences noted by Hatcher being due to preparation (absence of hyposphenes) and ontogeny (fusion of sacral spines). This synonymy has been universally followed since.

Eighty-five years after Hatcher’s three papers, McIntosh and Williams (1988) described a new species of Haplocanthosaurus — H. delfsi — and this one has been accepted as valid. Their paper contains a photograph of the mounted skeleton in the Cleveland Museum:

What I didn’t realise until recently is that this is not how the skeleton was first exhibited at the museum. In an article about the new remount of this skeleton (its tail is off the floor at last!), Emily Driehaus writes that “by 1957, the team had fully excavated the dinosaur—and it was on display in the Museum by 1961”. And the article includes this photo:

I’ve never seen anything like this. I’ve seen plenty of regular mounts, and I’ve seen panel mounts where the bones are laid out on the ground as they may have been when they were found. And I’ve seen photos of the bizarre everted-elbowed Diplodocus in St. Petersburg. But never an exhibit like this, with the rib-cage complete and articulated, but sitting on the ground with the legs splayed out.

I wonder what the story was here? Did they get as far as building the torso, then run out of time or money? Were they trying for a possible sleeping posture? That doesn’t work at all: the femur would have been disarticulated in that posture, and the torso would need to be higher off the ground to allow space for the guts and gastralia.

Does anyone know any more about this?

References

• Hatcher, John B. 1903a. A new sauropod dinosaur from the Jurassic of Colorado. Proceedings of the Biology Society of Washington 16:1–2.
• Hatcher, John B. 1903b. A new name for the dinosaur Haplocanthus Hatcher. Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington 16:100.
• Hatcher, John B. 1903c. Osteology of Haplocanthosaurus with description of a new species, and remarks on the probable habits of the Sauropoda and the age and origin of the Atlantosaurus beds; additional remarks on Diplodocus. Memoirs of the Carnegie Museum 2:1–75 and plates I–VI.
• McIntosh, John S, and Michael E. Williams. 1988. A new species of sauropod dinosaur, Haplocanthosaurus delfsi sp. nov., from the Upper Jurassic Morrison Fm. of Colorado. Kirtlandia 43:3–26.