Re: [dinosaur] Ultrasaurus in Reader's Digest

This got me to try to dig up my copy of a SCIENCE Digest (long defunct) article from I think around 1973 about Jensen's supersauropods. But I cannot find it even though I came across it not so long ago, is around here somewhere. It may or may not be the same one that was in READER'Ss Digest. The SD featured Matthew's 1915 skeletal of Brachiosaurus https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/matthew1915-fig24-brachiosaurus.jpeg -- back then there were few images of the skeletons of brachiosaurs.

Around that time I saw Jensen appear on the game show To Tell the Truth, or maybe it was What's My Line, or possibly I've Got a Secret -- they were all pretty much the same. The panelists had to decide which of three guests were a real person and/or what they did.

This is very interesting --

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaKLArW1s1E

The very best scene in this doc is seeing good old Jack (Sauropod) Macintosh. This might be the only video of who was the world's most preeminent sauropod expert for decades (and WW2 vet who flew in B-29s over Japan). He was a great guy, I miss him very considerably. I met Jack perhaps the very same year he was filmed for this video, by chance at my first visit to the back area of the Smithsonian May/June 76, so his scene might have been shot be just a few weeks later, or perhaps it was shot the summer 75. Among the art I showed Jack was a pair of Brachiosaurus.

Don't know who the Japanese paleontologist was.

The doc includes the excavation of a lot of the remains of Jensen's giants, including the super pelvis and ultra scap-coracoid (which Jensen walks on jeez.) Some scenes look staged including the discovery of the quarry -- why would that incident have been filmed? -- but others are more real time.

The very nicely done painting of Allosaurus chasing Camptosaurus into water is one of Bill Berry's dinoart on display at DinoNatMon in the late 60s into the 80s which I visited in 69 and 78 (when I was lucky that Jack M happened to be there:), I featured Berry's art which was very influential to me in the Scientific American Book of the Dinosaur I edited, and there is talk of a book being done on his superbly done last _expression_ of classic dinoart, some of which was more modern as per this painting. The brief images of a Morrison fossil site being formed are from the old DNM diorama I remember well.

Don't know where this BYU doc was broadcast, I never saw it and likely would have back when dinodocs were superscarce if it appeared in the Wash DC area (a national dinodoc would not appear until the 1977 NOVA classic The Hot Blooded Dinosaurs on PBS). If any are wondering why it appears among a set of youtube videos about Mormons that's because Jensen was a dedicated Latter Day Saint (which I know a fair amount about one of my ancestors on my mother's side being a body guard of Joseph Smith who then went to Salt Lake valley where he had 6 wives, ah the good old days). Jensen rose high in the LDS lay priesthood. I was told that most of the men working in the quarry were LDS men under the aegis of the LDS Relief Society, the church welfare system in which people needing aid have to work for it. So it was not like his field seasons were happening places.

Straight laced LDS Jensen and Bohemian leftist Pentecostal Bakker, the two most prominent dinopeople of the 70s, loathed one another. And J did not like me either partly because of the association with B, also because I disagreed with J a lot. After the Johns Hopkins crew I was with led by B briefly visited the North Horn formation in UT (near where my grandmother grew up, and mother and an uncle spent preteen summers), home of Alamosaurus and Tyrannosaurus, to check out the paleohabitat (lots of caliche shows it was seasonally arid, like the Morrison, rather than wet coastal like your contemporary Hell Creek), J complained in a note in the SocVertPaleo annual field work publication. J was the Paleo King of Utah. Never mind that he ventured into CO.

On a reprint of his 1987 paper on his sauropods I have Jensen scrawled "Here's One for Paul & Bakker to tear apart," which I promptly did next year.

In the early 90s I was hanging out with Ken Carpenter's crew at the Morrison in Garden Park CO. A local had a nearly perfect and peculiar humerus that was a dead ringer for Jensen's Torvosaurus. I could barely tell it apart from the illustration in the Galton & Jensen paper, and it was just a few mm different in size.

GSPaul

-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Taylor <sauropoda@gmail.com>
To: dinosaur-l <dinosaur-l@usc.edu>
Sent: Fri, Aug 16, 2019 7:55 am
Subject: [dinosaur] Ultrasaurus in Reader's Digest

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= 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= 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.