Back in 2012, when Matt and I were at the American Museum of Natural History to work on “ Apatosaurus ” minimus , we also photographed some other sacra for comparative purposes. One of them you’ve already seen — that of the Camarasaurus supremus holotype AMNH 5761.
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One thing that I’ve never understood is why some people are skeptical about sauropods using their tails defensively, when lizards do this all the time.
Go to Google and do a picture search for “natural history museum”. Here are the results I get.
Introduction and Background I have three goals with this post: To document the range of variation in epipophyses in the cervical vertebrae of sauropods. To show that the “finger-like processes” overhanging the cervical postzygapophyses in the newly described Qijianglong are not novel or mysterious structures, just very well developed epipophyses.
Arriving as an early Christmas present, and coming in just a week before the end of what would otherwise have been a barren 2014, my paper Quantifying the effect of intervertebral cartilage on neutral posture in the necks of sauropod dinosaurs is out!
I have often argued that given their long hindlimbs, massive tail-bases, and posteriorly-located centers of mass, diplodocids were basically bipeds whose forelimbs happened to reach the ground. I decided to see what that might look like. Okay, now obviously I know that there are no trackways showing sauropods actually getting around like this. It’s just a thought experiment.
This was inspired by an email Mike sent a couple of days ago: I replied that I was indeed freaked out, and that it had given me an idea for a post, which you are now reading. I didn’t have a Giraffatitan that was sufficiently distortion-free, so I used my old trusty Brachiosaurus . The vertebra you see there next to Mike and next to the neck of Brachiosaurus is BYU 9024, the longest vertebra that has ever been
Check out this beautiful Lego Diplodocus : (Click through for the full image at full size.) I particularly like the little touch of having of bunch of Lego Victorian gentleman scientists clustered around it, though they’re probably a bit too big for the skeleton. This is the work of MolochBaal, and all rights are reserved. You can see five more views of this model in his Flickr gallery.
I need to be sleeping, not blogging, so here are just the highlights, with no touch-ups and minimal commentary. I don’t know what these real street signs were doing sitting on the ground when I walked to the museum this morning, but it was a good omen for the conference. Home base for this part of the conference. We head to Green River, Utah, on Friday for the Early Cretaceous half. I had never seen this on exhibit.