Dinosaur Bone Pendant Necklace
Dinosaur Bone Pendant Necklace
This necklace features a single round bead of dinosaur bone set inside a sterling silver circle. The hand-finished beads are agatized sauropod bone from the Morrison Formation of Utah. One of the most studied fossil beds of the upper Jurassic Period, the region was once home to a large floodplain ecosystem 150,000,000 years ago.
Though the exact species is not known, these fossils are typically attributed to Apatosaurus.
📸 Dinosaur Bone Pendant Necklace
A Mini Museum Original!
Handcrafted here at Mini Museum, the pendant comes on an 18" (45cm) sterling silver, box-style chain.
The beads measure 0.75" (2cm) in diameter and vary widely in color and pattern.
As pictured, the necklace arrives in a black display box. A small information card about the bone is also included inside. The card serves as the certificate of authenticity and can be found underneath the padded lining of the display box.
📸 Samples of dinosaur bone beads. The beads vary widely in color and texture. Each is unique and beautiful.
"At last, in the top of the ledge where the softer overlying beds form a divide, a kind of saddle, I saw eight of the tail bones of a brontosaurus in exact position. It was a beautiful sight. Part of the ledge had weathered away and several of the vertebra had weathered out and the beautifully preserved centra lay on the ground. It is by far the best-looking dinosaur prospect I have ever found. The part exposed is worth preserving anyway." ~ Earl Douglass on finding the first Apatosaurus skeleton on August 17, 1909
📸 Agatized Sauropod Bone (Mini Museum)
First described in 1879, Apatosaurus is one of the best-known of all sauropods. In the public mind, this popularity is due to early confusion that led to the skulls of other sauropods being mounted on their skeletons under the name of Brontosaurus.
Currently the Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus genera are taken to constitute the Apatosaurinae, a subfamily of diplodocid sauropods. Apatosaurus includes at least two recognized species: A. louisae, which may have reached 75 feet long and 20 or more tons, and A. ajax, a giant on the order of 36 to 80 tons.
Apatosaurus showed the typical diplodocid design of a long neck, a very long and whip-tapered tail, and a small, low-set head with peg-like teeth. The apatosaurinids were more heavily built sauropods, however, than the related North American diplodocids Diplodocus and Barosaurus, with a substantially thicker neck that may have been adapted for wielding in dominance battles with their own kind, rather like the bull giraffes of today.
Contemporaneous sauropods appear to have coexisted by pursuing different modes of browsing. A 2018 analysis assessing Apatosaurus and Diplodocus specimens from the Morrison Formation in Colorado concluded that the former had higher tooth-replacement rates than the latter, suggesting Apatosaurus may have fed more heavily on tougher plantlife than Diplodocus, such as conifers and cycads.
For decades, skulls from other sauropods, notably Camarasaurus, were mistakenly mounted on Apatosaurus skeletons, and meanwhile the genus Brontosaurus, first described in 1879 but shortly thereafter considered synonymous with Apatosaurus and thus obsolete, was resurrected as a distinct sister clade to Apatosaurus in 2015.
📸 Apatosaurus louisae on display (with the right head) at the Carnegie Museum by Tadek Kurpaski (2009)
Further Reading
Dumont, Maitena, et al. "Long bone cortices in a growth series of Apatosaurus sp. (Dinosauria: Diplodocidae): geometry, body mass, and crystallite orientation of giant animals." Biological journal of the Linnean Society 112.4 (2014): 782-798.
McHugh, Julia B. "Evidence for niche partitioning among ground-height browsing sauropods from the Upper Jurassic Morrison Formation of North America." Geology of the Intermountain West 5 (2018): 95-103.
Taylor, Michael P., et al. “Were the Necks of Apatosaurus & Brontosaurus Adapted for Combat?” PeerJ Preprints, 3:e1347v1, 2015.
Weishampel, David B., et al. (eds). The Dinosauria – Second Edition. University of California Press, 2004.
Wedel, Matt. “A Giant, Skeletally Immature Individual of Apatosaurus From the Morrison Formation of Oklahoma.” 61st Symposium on Vertebrate Palaeontology and Comparative Anatomy - Programme and Abstracts, 2013, pp. 40–45.
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