for as long as humans have taken photos, some of those humans have wanted to be photographed next to the really big cool thing they found

frequently those cool things have been sauropod femurs as it turns out

[ID: a collage of four images. moving clockwise from topmost left they are: a black-and-white image from 1900 of paleontologist Harold Menke in Colorado lying next to the femur of a Brachiosaurus, which is longer than he is tall; a 2014 photo of paleontologist Jose Ignacio Canudo in Argentina lying in a similar pose next to the femur of the titanosaur Patagotitan, which is also longer than he is tall; a 2021 photo of biologist Jennifer Johnson lying in the bottom of a boat next to a seven-foot-long lake sturgeon tagged in the Detroit River; a 2018 photo of a paleontologist in the Gobi Desert lying next to a pair of enormous three-toed dinosaur footprints.]

if I had a nickel for every time I have read a field report along the lines of “we couldn’t find the measuring tape, but the wall segment was 3 and 3/4th Jeremys long” with a quick math scribble for the approximate length and an annotation added in later of the actual measurement, I would have about a dollar ten. A person is a valid unit of measurement when all else fails.

OH SO THIS IS WHY PEOPLE KEEP TAGGING MY POST ‘CARLOS FOR SCALE’