Very belatedly, I come to an email from Joe Parish, who on 8 March — a full month ago — emailed me to draw my attention to a life reconstruction of Camarasaurus that was published in 1880: one year earlier than the 1886 “atlantosaur” by Jules Blanadet that we thought was the oldest.

The new record-holder appeared in both the New York edition and the London edition of Holder (1885:plate XVIII), and here it is:

I’ve not been able to figure out who the artist is — can anyone help? Unfortunately, Holder had very little to say about this illustration: here’s the whole of the relevant text (Holder 1885:107):

Even more remarkable than the above [mosasaurs including Clidastes] were the Amphicoelias and Camarasaurus (Plate XVIII.), the former attaining a length of one hundred feet, and the latter seventy-five — gigantic serpentine reptiles that floated in shallow waters, anchored by their ponderous tail and legs.

It’s a shame there’s no more discussion, because this is a fascinating piece. The neck, tail and limbs are all shockingly slender by modern standards of what we’d expect to in a Camarasaurus. But really, even in 1885, there’s no excuse for this. I think of Tom Holtz’s rule of dinosaur restorations: if you can’t fit the skeleton inside the model, the model is wrong. And there’s no way to get Cam cevicals into that flamingo-like neck.

(Pedantic note: the neck is not really flamingo-like. It’s flamingo-neck-like. It resembles a flamingo’s neck, not an entire flamingo.)

Surely the strangest part of the restoration is the small trunk protruding from the front of the head. I thought that the idea of trunks in sauropods originated with Coombs (1975), but evidently it’s ninety years older than that! I wonder what strange line of evidence led the anonymous artist to restore the head that way?

Anyway: if anyone can find a yet older sauropod restoration, I want to know about it! Leave a comment.

My thanks to Joe Parish for pointing me at this, and my apologies for taking so long to blog about it (or even reply to his email)!

• Coombs, W. P. 1975. Sauropod habits and habitats. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 17:1-33.
• Holder, Charles Frederick. 1885. Marvels of Animal Life. London : Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington Collection.

doi:10.59350/kw8mn-q2q26