Since we’ve been a bit light on sauropods lately, here’s CM 11338, the juvenile Camarasaurus from Dinosaur National Monument, in Plate 15 from Gilmore’s 1925 monograph. It’s probably the nicest single sauropod skeleton ever found, and required only minor restoration and reposing for this wall mount at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. The same thing in a fake antique finish suitable for printing at 8×10″ and framing.

Re-posted with permission. Of course, these these days John is better known for this work on the evolution of musculature on the line to birds, tyrannosaur hindlimb mechanics, and elephant anatomy.  But it seems the world lost a promising novelist. [Originally posted on Twitter, by John.] See also: Acaren and the Evil Wizards .

This tutorial is based on all the things that I stupidly forgot to do along the way of tearing down the juvenile giraffe neck that Darren, John Conway and I recently got to take to pieces.  At half a dozen different points in that process, I found myself thinking “Oh, we should have done X earlier on!”  So it’s not a tutorial founded on the idea that I know how this should be done;

In a comment on the previous post, Dean asked: “What was the difference in length between the neck with its cartilage and the bones flush together?” I’m glad you asked me that.  You’ll recall from last time that the fully fleshed neck — intact apart from the removal of the skin and maybe some superficial muscle — was 51 cm in length from the front of the atlas to the back of the centrum of the seventh cervical vertebra.

Back in early Februrary, Darren and I got an email out of the blue from biomechanics wizard and all all-round good guy John Hutchinson, saying that he’d obtained the neck of a baby giraffe — two weeks old at the time of death — and that if we wanted it, it was ours.

Sinclair brontosaur, Hennessey, Oklahoma. This one has cement shoes because some ne’er-do-wells ganked the old one in the middle of the night a couple of years ago.

This is so unspeakably cool. Today in PLoS Biology (yay, free reprints for everybody!), Wilson et al. (2010) describe a new snake, Sanajeh indicus , based on multiple specimens from multiple sauropod nests where they were apparently eating baby sauropods! This is sweet for loads of reasons. There aren’t that many well-documented cases of predation in the fossil record in the first place.

Othniel Charles Marsh, who was always careful to base all of his hundreds of new taxa on the best, most diagnostic material available (Alert: Sarcasm detected!), named Pleurocoelus nanus based on a handful of junenile sauropod vertebrae centra from the Arundel clays of Maryland (Marsh 1888). Here’s the dorsal.

Every once in a while it’s good to remember that no matter how big you end up, everybody starts out small. Jack McIntosh came through the OMNH a few years ago and identified all of our sauropod material. There are babies of both Camarasaurus and Apatosaurus from this quarry.

I was going to write about mystery cervicals of the Cloverly Formation, but that requires knowing something about juvenile vertebrae and Pleurocoelus , so I decided to write about Pleurocoelus , but that still requires knowing something about juvenile vertebrae. So I’m writing this tutorial to lay the groundwork for more goodness to come.