As we’ve previously noted more than once here at SV-POW!, apatosaurine cervicals really are the craziest things. For one thing, they are the only dinosaur bones to have inspired the design of a Star Wars spaceship. One result of this very distinctive cervical shape, with the ribs hanging down far below the centra, was that the necks of apatosaurines would have been triangular in cross-section, rather than tubular as often depicted.

A while back, we noted that seriously, Apatosaurus is just nuts, as proven by the illustrations in Ostrom and McIntosh (1966: plate 12). Now I’m posting those illustrations again, in a modified form, to make the same point.

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Today is a good day for sauropod science. Since we’re not getting this up until the afternoon, you’ve probably already seen that Emanuel Tschopp and colleagues have published a monstrous specimen-level phylogenetic analysis of Diplodocidae and, among other things, resurrected Brontosaurus as a valid genus.

In 2012, Matt and I spent a week in New York, mostly working at the AMNH on “ Apatosaurus “ minimus and a few other specimens that caught our eye.

A while back, Ben Miller reminded me that when I posted about the old Yale “ Brontosaurus ” skull, I promised: So how did the YPM come to make such a monstrosity? What was it based on? Tune in next time for the surprising details! I told him at the time that I’d soon get around to writing a post. But before I did, he wrote a post on this himself: Bully for Camarasaurus . And it’s excellent.

How can it be? All credit to the Yale Peabody Museum for having the courage to display this historically important object in their public gallery instead of hiding it in a basement. It’s the skull from the original mount of the Brontosaurus (= Apatosaurus ) excelsus holotype YPM 1980.

“Look at all the things you’ve done for me Opened up my eyes, Taught me how to see, Notice every tree.” So sings Dot in Move On, the climactic number of Stephen Sondheim’s Pulitzer Prize-winning music Sunday in the Park with George, which on the surface is about the post-impressionist painter Georges Seurat, but turns […]

In a paper for which we’re currently handling the revisions, I and Matt cite several pieces of artwork, including Knight’s classic Brontosaurus and Burian’s snorkelling Brachiosaurus . All we have for the references are: Knight CR (1897) Restoration of Brontosaurus . Burian Z (1941) Snorkelling Brachiosaurus . But a reviewer asked us: I don’t really have any idea what the right way is to cite artwork — does