The Morrison Formation Sauropod Consensus: A freely accessible online spreadsheet of collected sauropod specimens, their housing institutions, contents, references, localities, and other potentially useful information

The Morrison Formation has been explored for dinosaurs for more than 150 years, often specifically for largesauropod skeletons curators wanted to mount as attractions in their museum exhibits around the world. Severallong-term campaigns to the Jurassic West of the United States produced hundreds of specimens, ranging fromisolated, fragmentary bones to nearly complete skeletons of these enormous herbivorous animals. Given thesheer number of specimens, keeping track of what is housed in which institution is paramount to study variability,taxonomy, and consequently geographic and temporal distribution of the various species and genera recognizedfrom the Morrison Formation. In an attempt to facilitate these studies, we have compiled an online spreadsheetintended to combine all the available information on sauropod specimens from collection databases, publishedliterature, and personal observations. These include lists of contents of the specimens, in what institution thematerial is housed, references mentioning, describing, figuring, providing measurements and/or 3D scans, localitydata and stratigraphy, as well as other potentially useful data for research purposes. The spreadsheet is openlyaccessible, but editing is currently restricted to the authors of this study, in order to ensure high-quality datacuration to keep the file as useful as possible.