Big Al: Breaking a Leg in the Jurassic
Today I'm talking about my favourite dinosaur. Big Al (or MOR 693) was a sub-adult Allosaurus fragilis from the Morrison Formation of the Upper Jurassic in Wyoming. Discovered in 1991, Big Al currently resides at the Museum of the Rockies. He (or she?) lived a very rough life and sustained a number of pathologies, which tells us a lot about the biology of Allosaurus and the ecology of North America in the Upper Jurassic.
EDIT: Big Al was split from Allosaurus fragilis in 2020 into a new species, Allosaurus jimmadseni (Chure and Loewen 2020).
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/zoognosisjoy...
Sources
Foth, C., Evers, S. W., Pabst, B., Mateus, O., Flisch, A., Patthey, M., & Rauhut, O. W. (2015). New insights into the lifestyle of Allosaurus (Dinosauria: Theropoda) based on another specimen with multiple pathologies. PeerJ, 3, e940.
Laws, R. R. (1996). Paleopathological analysis of a sub-adult Allosaurus fragilis (MOR 693) from the Upper Jurassic Morrison Formation with multiple injuries and infections (Doctoral dissertation, Montana State University-Bozeman, College of Letters & Science).
Wilkin, J. (2019). Review of Pathologies on MOR 693: An Allosaurus from the Late Jurassic of Wyoming and Implications for Understanding Allosaur Immune Systems.
Images
By Photo by Michael Overton. - Digital photograph, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index...
By Fred Wierum - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index...
By Fred Wierum - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index...
By Christian Foth1,2, Serjoscha Evers2,3, Ben Pabst4, Octávio Mateus5,6, Alexander Flisch7, Mike Patthey8, Oliver W. M. Rauhut1,2 - https://peerj.com/preprints/824/, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index...
By Tim Evanson from Washington, D.C., United States of America - Allosaurus fragilis - Big Al - Big Horn County Wyoming - Museum of the Rockies - 2013-07-08Uploaded by FunkMonk, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index...