Let’s look again at Figure 7 of our recent paper on bifurcated cervical ribs in apatosaurines: {.size-full .wp-image-21519 aria-describedby=“caption-attachment-21519” loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“21519” permalink=“http://svpow.com/papers-by-sv-powsketeers/wedel-and-taylor-2023-on-bifurcated-cervical-ribs/figure-7-diplo-apato-muscle-comparison-2/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2023/11/figure-7-diplo-apato-muscle-comparison.jpeg”

Some quick backstory: lots of sauropods have long, overlapping cervical ribs, like the ones shown here in Sauroposeidon (diagram from this old post): {.size-large .wp-image-10817 .aligncenter loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“10817” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2014/09/22/wheelbarrow-handles-for-vertebrae-the-cervical-rib-bundles-of-sauroposeidon-and-other-sauropods/sauroposeidon-cervical-rib-cross-sections-v3/”

As John himsef admits in the tweet that announced this picture, it’s five years late … but I am prepared to forgive that because IT’S NEVER TOO LATE TO BRONTOSMASH!

Darren Naish, the silent third partner in SV-POW!, alerted me to this piece by palaeoartist Steve White: {.alignnone .wp-image-16447 .size-full loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“16447” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2019/08/17/steve-whites-impressionist-brontosmash/steve-white-impressionist-brontosmash/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2019/08/steve-white-impressionist-brontosmash.jpeg” orig-size=“768,1024” comments-opened=“1”

Thanks to a comment from long-time reader Andrew Stuck, I realised he is also the tweeter @dinodadreviews, who pointed us to Xenoposeidon in a kids’ book. Now, a review on his website of Ted Rechlin’s comic-book Jurassic has pointed me to what I think is the first depiction of the BRONTOSMASH!

We’ve posted a lot here about how crazy the cervical vertebrae of apatosaurines are (for example: 1, 2, 3), and especially the redonkulosity of their cervical ribs.

The afternoon of Day 1 at TetZooCon 2018 was split into two parallel streams: downstairs, some talks that I would have loved to see; and upstairs, a palaeoart workshop that I was even keener not to miss out on. There were talks by Luis Rey (on how palaeoart has had to be dragged kicking and screaming into accepting feathers and bright colours) and by Mark Witton (on the future of palaeoart — sadly, bereft of slides). Both fascinating.

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I’d hoped that we’d see a flood of BRONTOSMASH-themed artwork, but that’s not quite happened. We’ve seen a trickle, though, and that’s still exciting. Here are the ones I know about. If anyone knows of more, please let me know and I will update this post.

Here’s the last post (at least for now) in the Fighting Apatosaur Art series — and we’re back to Brian Engh, who we started with. Early in the process of putting together artwork to illustrate our apatosaur neck combat hypothesis, Brian tried out a whole bunch of outlandish concepts. Here are two that he showed us, but which were too speculative to push forward with.