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Myths and checks
What this site will not flatten
1. Dippy, in London, is:
2. The Natural History Museum’s Dino Directory length is:
3. Taylor, Wedel and Moacdieh (2025) measured the current Carnegie mount at about:
Dippy is a plaster-of-Paris replica of a Diplodocus carnegii, whose original skeleton is at the Carnegie Museum. [NHM Dippy] The directory gives the length as 26.0 m. [NHM Directory] Taylor, Wedel and Moacdieh (2025) note that numerous divergent length measurements exist for this specimen, but that the current mount is about 26.1 m long based on photogrammetric and LIDAR models. [Taylor et al. 2025]
Things worth keeping distinct
- Dippy is a cast. The original bones are at the Carnegie Museum. Dippy is a plaster-of-Paris replica of a Diplodocus carnegii, whose original skeleton is at the Carnegie Museum. [NHM Dippy]
- The Carnegie mount is a composite, with casts and sculptures in important places. The bulk of the skeleton is the holotype CM 84; the paratype CM 94, a referred specimen CM 33985, and a related-species specimen CM 307 provide more fossil material. [Taylor et al. 2025] Significant parts of the mount are casts or sculptures, including the skull, atlas, numerous caudal vertebrae, the forelimbs, and most of the left hind limb. [Taylor et al. 2025]
- Directory length, Dippy range, Carnegie 85 feet, and the 2025 models are all published. They are close, and they are not merged here.
- Museum weights around 15 tonnes are not the same claim as Britannica’s “slightly more than 30 tons” or “as much as 80 tons.” Britannica says that while most of these dinosaurs weighed slightly more than 30 tons, some members of the genus may have weighed as much as 80 tons. [Britannica]
- The 2026 photograph of Dippy at the Natural History Museum is not a picture of the Hintze Hall years that ended on 4 January 2017. Dippy’s last day on show in London was 4 January 2017. [NHM]
- Fern, in the Museum gardens, is a sculpture. This site does not use it as if it were a fossil.
- The Commons description of the Berlin head photograph quotes a Brachiosaurus notice. The file is titled as the Diplodocus carnegii skeleton, and the skull in the picture is a long, low diplodocid.