Re: [dinosaur] Ultrasaurus in Reader's Digest

Ben Creisler

News stories about the "Ultrasaurus" find came out in 1979 around July.Â

New York Times July 31, 1979, Section A, Page 1

Paleontologist in Colorado Finds Evidence of the Biggest Dinosaur ...

A Utah paleontologist, digging in an ancient dry river bed on a windswept Colorado mesa, has found bones of the biggest dinosaur that has yet been discovered â a huge animal that, he estimates, would have been able to look into a topâfloor window of a fiveâ or six. story building.

https://www.nytimes.com/1979/07/31/archives/paleontologist-in-colorado-finds-evidence-of-the-biggest-dinosaur.html
==

People Magazine October 22, 1979

'Dinosaur Jim' Jensen Finds a Shoulder Bone That Was Connected to a Set of Bones 50 Feet Tall

https://people.com/archive/dinosaur-jim-jensen-finds-a-shoulder-bone-that-was-connected-to-a-set-of-bones-50-feet-tall-vol-12-no-17/

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I browsed the Reader's Digest contents posted as cover images online and don't see anything that obviously matches in the July through December 1979 issues and early 1980 issues.Â

https://oldmags.com/publications/Readers-Digest

On Fri, Aug 16, 2019 at 4:55 AM Mike Taylor <sauropoda@gmail.com> wrote:

I was about eleven years old, so the year would have 1979 or so. I was
in the waiting room at an optician, to be tested for my first pair of
glasss. As I waited, I browsed a Reader's Digest and it was there that
I first read about Ultrasaurus, the greatest of all the dinosaurs!

... At least, that's how I remember it. But I know memories can be
deceptive, and after all it WAS forty years ago.

The thing is, I can't find that Reader's Digest. I have the much
earlier 1973 article in RD, by Jean George, about Supersaurus, and
it's POSSIBLE that the optician had a six-year-old Reader's Digest in
a waiting room and that's what I read, and that my mind is filling in
missing pieces. But I don't think so: I'm pretty sure it was
Ultrasaurus I was reading about.

As some of you will know, I am part way through a project to
reconstruct the history of Jensen's big three Dry Mesa sauropods: a
timeline summarising what I've found so far can be found at
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__svpow.com_2019_07_17_supersaurus-2Dtimeline_&d=DwIFaQ&c=clK7kQUTWtAVEOVIgvi0NU5BOUHhpN0H8p7CSfnc_gI&r=Ry_mO4IFaUmGof_Yl9MyZgecRCKHn5g4z1CYJgFW9SI&m=rRlOPi0W0w9TDLHsSzNvlZPLsHq8YXMJAFsGJsekG1M&s=D90RQKD9flvl5s6BMQBrR2hF0-37AZupJSebv0zbV1I&e=Â and this is part of
a larger project re-evaluating Supersaurus, indexed at
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__svpow.com_supersaurus-2Dand-2Dco-2Din-2D2019_&d=DwIFaQ&c=clK7kQUTWtAVEOVIgvi0NU5BOUHhpN0H8p7CSfnc_gI&r=Ry_mO4IFaUmGof_Yl9MyZgecRCKHn5g4z1CYJgFW9SI&m=rRlOPi0W0w9TDLHsSzNvlZPLsHq8YXMJAFsGJsekG1M&s=AWcAf-EFoJRI7tZFcIP5u-cJoaEcpUshKugpzextVso&e=

As part of that project â and also for sheer nostalgia â I would LOVE
to recover a copy of that 1979-or-thereabouts Reader's Digest article
about Ultrasaurus. (It can't have been from before 1979, as that's
when the not-really-type scapulocoracoid was found and the name
coined.) But RD's own search facilities are pretty wretched:
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.rd.com_tmbi-5Ffirst-5Fassociated_magazine_&d=DwIFaQ&c=clK7kQUTWtAVEOVIgvi0NU5BOUHhpN0H8p7CSfnc_gI&r=Ry_mO4IFaUmGof_Yl9MyZgecRCKHn5g4z1CYJgFW9SI&m=rRlOPi0W0w9TDLHsSzNvlZPLsHq8YXMJAFsGJsekG1M&s=7oS6aPEZKPHwf8pnnkdhShAe0RUG6Ktsy9PcL0ZKGQk&e=Â and can't find
anything. Certainly a search for "ultrasaurus" or even "supersaurus"
finds nothing.

Can anyone help? I have no idea how, really, but if there's any
community that can come up with something, it's this one.

-- Mike.