Mongolian dinosaurs, 2002: part 2

Following from the previous installment, this second and final batch of museum photos comes from the "Paleontology Laboratory". This time around, I'm pretty sure I took almost all of them, both film and digital photos. It was probably my first extended use of a digital camera, and most of the photos I've selected are from the digital set. The facility had a small hall displaying ten or so specimens, none as large as the Tarbosaurus at the Natural History Museum, but again coelurosaur-heavy.

First up is Avimimus portentosus. I've always been fond of this little theropod and I tried to take a number of photos, but they almost all ended up blurry. Below is the best shot.

Avimimus portentosus.

The ornithomimosaurs were again well-represented, including a subadult Gallimimus bullatus, a skeleton of the still-undescribed "Gallimimus mongoliensis", and Harpymimus okladnikovi.

G. bullatus laid out for the count.

This mount was identified as "Gallimimus mongoliensis". It is identified as a juvenile G. bullatus in some online photographs. (At some point ribs and additional chevrons were added.)

The pelvis and hindlimbs of "G. mongoliensis"

Harpymimus okladnikovi, showing an unaltered opisthotonic (curved back) neck, something not infrequently seen in ornithomimosaur skeletons. The tail looks like it would have been doing something similar, except there were places near the base of the tail that could be separated for more convenient mounting.

Life in the Cretaceous of Mongolia was not all theropods, though. One of the more abundant taxa was the hadrosaur Saurolophus angustirostris, represented here by a cast of a headless subadult and an adult skull.

Pretty much the whole thing's here, with one notable exception.

Something like this is what's missing. The angle prevents us from seeing the crest, a backward-pointing spike rising over the top of the skull.

Finally, no survey of Mongolian dinosaurs is complete without Protoceratops andrewsi, which was represented here by an adult skeletal mount and a juvenile in a field jacket (I have only blurry photos of the latter).

This is the grown-up. You can see the thinness of the frill bones, the arched snout, and one of the premaxillary teeth peeking out behind the parrot beak.