And the winner is...

First off, I want to thank everyone who participated, we ended up with over 1000 votes (though not necessarily 1000 voters, as we’ll see below). There were several lead changes, but in the end a suspiciously strong showing for one dinosaur lost out to an even more suspicious last minute route by another dinosaur.

So without further ado, that (winning) dinosaur is…

Guanlong wucaii, the Late Jurassic tyrannosauroid from China.

It should be noted that after lamenting the lack of interest Sauroposeidon was garnering Saturday (when it could only muster 7th place on 44 votes) it had a ridiculously good last 24 hours, nearly tripling its vote total to 127 votes. I’m not sure where the last minute contingent of Sauroposeidon supporters came from, but they were no match for the cabal of voter(s?) that stuffed the ballot in favor of Guanlong.

To the right you can see the final vote tally - Guanlong, which after two and a half days of voting was holding down a respectable second place with 82 votes ended with an improbable 347 votes, quadrupling its vote total in the last 24 hours.

The fact that both Sauroposeidon and Guanlong showed much stronger gains on the website poll (which was anonymous) than on Facebook or DeviantArt (both require logins) suggests that a small number of voters were following the “Vote early, vote often!” mantra for their favorite dinosaurs (well, at least the “vote often” part).

I have to say I’m really rather surprised that there was this degree of interest in the outcome. I didn’t lay down any ground rules on how to vote, so Guanlong will be the next skeletal reconstruction I finish (though not the next skeletal I post…). I had no strong personal preference, my only concern is that everyone feel like their votes matter; as a result next time I’ll take steps to prevent ballot box stuffing to quite this extent.

Anyhow, there should be a surprise or two later this week, aside from the end-of-the-week posting of the Guanlong skeletal, so check back for more soon!