PREPARATION AND MORPHOMETRIC ANALYSIS OF A CAMARASAURUS (DINOSAURIA: SAUROPODA) SKULL AND ASSOCIATED BONES FROM THE MORRISON FORMATION OF WYOMING

A partial Camarasaurus skull was donated to Utah Valley University in the early to mid-2000’s and has been sitting unstudied for the past 20 years. The skull was collected by Western Paleontological labs at the Stego 99 quarry near Medicine Bow, Wyoming. The plaster jacketing used to support and protect the skull had been flipped prior to fully curing, causing substantial damage to the skull and other bones, which led to its donation. In April of 2024 we began preparation of the jacketed bones to remove more of the sandstone matrix in order to better study the skull and determine what other fossil material was present. Once preparation is complete, all identifiable bones will be measured and described, morphometric measurements will be made of the skull, and the size, growth stage and species of the individual will be determined as accurately as possible with the preserved data. This work will present the preliminary findings of our preparation work as well as our morphometric analysis of the skull and other prepared bones removed from the surrounding sandstone matrix. While Camarasaurus is one of the most commonly collected genera of dinosaurs, it is also one of the most understudied (Woodruff, 2021). We hope that the contribution of our morphometric measurements and comparison to other known skulls will help create a more complete picture of body size variation and ontogeny for the genus. While a single specimen may not dramatically alter our understanding of the genus, the data that we gather from this work could have been lost to science completely as these were privately collected fossils.