As described in the last post, Jessie Atterholt is presenting our poster on this project today, at the 14th Symposium on Mesozoic Terrestrial Ecosystems and Biota (MTE14) in Salt Lake City, and the related paper is in the MTE14 volume in The Anatomical Record.

I was on a video call with Matt, talking about a project he’s working on that involves Haplocanthosaurus . A lot of his recent project involve Haplocanthosaurus which is … an OK sauropod. I mean, it’s no brachiosaur. So this is how the conversation went: Mike: I have bad news for you, dude. Haplocanthosaurus is only one or two nodes away from being a camarasaur.

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Here’s figure 1 from my 2005 book chapter. I tried to cram as much pneumatic sauropod vertebra morphology into one figure as I could.

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What if I told you that when Matt was in BYU collections a while ago, he stumbled across a cervical vertebra — one labelled DM/90 CVR 3+4, say — that looked like this in anterior view?

Because I’ve worked a lot on the anatomy and evolution of air-filled bones in sauropod dinosaurs, I’ve spent most of my career looking at images like this: {.wp-image-17072 .size-large aria-describedby=“caption-attachment-17072” loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“17072” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2020/01/28/natures-ct-machine/apatosaurus-cervical-ct-wedel-2003b-fig-5/”

When I visited Dinosaur National Monument in October with Brian Engh and Yara Haridy, we spent a decent amount of time checking out DNM 28, a skull and associated bits of Camarasaurus . In particular, I got some shots of the axis (the second cervical vertebra behind the head), and it got me thinking about pneumaticity in this unusual element.

Unworn: {.size-large .wp-image-16745 .aligncenter loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“16745” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2019/11/02/worn-and-unworn-camarasaurus-teeth-in-the-collections-at-dinosaur-national-monument/dino-collections-unworn-camarasaurus-tooth/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2019/10/dino-collections-unworn-camarasaurus-tooth.jpg” orig-size=“3200,2400” comments-opened=“1”

{.size-full .wp-image-16492 aria-describedby=“caption-attachment-16492” loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“16492” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2019/08/21/the-stupidest-head/img_3830/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2019/08/img_3830.jpg” orig-size=“4000,3000” comments-opened=“1” image-meta=“{"aperture":"4","credit":"","camera":"Canon PowerShot