June 4, 2026
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 above.
It’s high resolution (3171 x 7931 pixels), so here’s how I recommend viewing. Click through to the full-sized image. Put your browser into full-screen mode. Adjust the scaling so the image fits the width of the screen. Then just enjoy scrolling through that long, long neck.
My deep gratitude to Jarrod for doing the work on this, and to Matt for taking the original photos. The image is destined for a paper that I’m working on, but it was just too good not to share with y’all.
I want to get this printed out extra-large and attach it to the wall of my office, ceiling-to-floor.