We have good descriptions of the proximal parts of the cervical ribs for lots of sauropods.

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

This is BYU 12867–you’ve seen it here before–in dorsal view. It’s not a brilliant shot–I took it through the glass of the display case while filming a documentary at the North American Museum of Ancient Life in Lehi, Utah, in 2008. Centrum length is 94 cm, total length with the overhanging prezygapophyses is over a meter.

My camera had a possibly-fatal accident in the field at the end of the day on Saturday, so I didn’t take any photos on Sunday or Monday. From here on out, you’re either getting my slides, or photos taken by other people. On Sunday we were at the John Wesley Powell River History Museum in Green River, Utah, for the Cretaceous talks.

You know the drill: lotsa pretty pix, not much yap. Our first stop of the day was the Fruita Paleontological Area, which has a fanstastic diversity of Morrison animals, including the mammal Fruitafossor and the tiny ornithopod Fruitadens . Plus it’s a pretty epic landscape, especially with the clouds and broken light we had this morning. I found a bone!

Order up! Sauroposeidon is stitched together from orthographic views of the 3D photogrammetric models rendered in MeshLab. Greyed out bits of the vertebrae are actually missing–I used C8 to patch C7, C7 to patch C6, and so on forward. The cervical ribs as reconstructed here were all recovered and they are in collections, but they’re in several jackets and boxes and therefore not easily photographed.

I was in Oklahoma and Texas last week, seeing Sauroposeidon, Paluxysaurus, Astrophocaudia, and Alamosaurus, at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History, the Shuler Museum of Paleontology at SMU, and the Perot Museum of Nature and Science, respectively.

The rest of the series. References Janensch, Werner.  1950.  Die Wirbelsaule von Brachiosaurus brancai .  Palaeontographica (Suppl. 7) 3: 27-93. Wedel, M.J., and Sanders, R.K. 2002.

That last one really hurts. Here’s the original image, which should have gone in the paper with the interpretive trace next to it rather than on top of it: The rest of the series. Papers referenced in these slides: Taylor, M.P., and Wedel, M.J. 2013b. The effect of intervertebral cartilage on neutral posture and range of motion in the necks of sauropod dinosaurs. PLOS ONE 8(10): e78214. 17 pages.

On that last slide, I also talked about two further elaborations: figures that take up the entire page, with the caption on a separate (usually facing) page, and side title figures, which are wider than tall and get turned on their sides to better use the space on the page.