I was at the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History in March to look at their Apatosaurus material, so I got to see the newly-mounted baby apatosaur in the “Clash of the Titans” exhibit (more photos of that exhibit in this post). How much of this is real (i.e., cast from real bones, rather than sculpted)? Most of the vertebral centra, a few of the neural arches, some of the limb girdle bones, and most of the long bones of the limbs.

I was recently bemoaning the lack of published diplodocid cervical illustrations in dorsal view. Subsequently I mentioned that Upchurch et al. (2005) had illustrated five cervicals of an Apatosaurus specimen. I was overlooking one other paper that contains such an illustration. Which is a bit embarrassing, as it’s one of ours. In fact, it’s our most recent paper, Wedel and Taylor (2013) on sauropod neural spine bifurcation.

Last time, I asked if anyone has dorsal-view photos of the cervical vertebrae of Diplodocus . No responses yet, and I do urge you to chip in if you have any ideas. But here’s something to keep us positive: Apatosaurus cervicals! This is Plate 1 from Upchurch et al.’s (2005) excellent descriptive monograph of a specimen of Apatosaurus ajax , NSMT-PV 20375.

Up top there is a commercially obtained cast sculpture of a thumb claw of Megaraptor. Down below is an unpainted urethane cast of one of my favorite inanimate objects in the universe: OMNH 780, a thumb claw of Saurophaganax.

Another raw photo from the road. The Morrison fossils from the Oklahoma panhandle were dug up and prepped out by  WPA workers in the 1930s, and their preparation toolkit consisted of hammers, chisels, pen-knives, and sandpaper.

Here’s an update from the road–get ready for some crappy raw images, because that’s all I have the time or energy to post (with one exception). Here’s OMNH 1331. It’s just the slightly convex articular end off a big vertebra, collected near Kenton, Oklahoma, in 1930s by one of J. Willis Stovall’s field crews.

Well, this is rad. And adorable. Brian Switek, whom we adore, commissioned a fuzzy juvenile sauropod from Niroot, whom we adore, for his (Brian’s) upcoming book, My Beloved Brontosaurus , which I am gearing up to adore. And here is the result, which I adore, borrowed with permission from Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs. There is much to like here. Here’s my rundown: Small forefeet that are the correct shape: good.

Today our paper on sauropod neck anatomy is formally published in PeerJ.

The last time we reported on the Apatosaurus cervical-shaped Umbaran Starfight from The Clone Wars , we’d heard from the concept artist Russell G. Chong, who had done the final design on the startfighter, and who told that he wasn’t aware of a sauropod original to the design.

A few weeks ago, we were considering the bizarre Umbaran Starfighter from The Clone Wars , and its extraordinary similarity to an Apatosaurus cervical: In a comment, Kyle Hartshorn suggested: Nice detective work. Here’s some of that concept art: I found an email address for Chong, and wrote to him: Russell was on vacation for a while, but wrote back a couple of days ago.