At the Prehistoric Museum in Price, Utah, our host Ken Carpenter invited us to jump right into the Camarasaurus pit and start pulling apart their beautiful specimen. We did.
Several drinks later, they all die and somehow become skeletonised, and that’s how they all land up on a table in my office: {.aligncenter .size-large .wp-image-13338 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“13338” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2016/04/14/a-fox-a-badger-a-pheasant-and-a-monitor-lizard-walk-into-a-bar/2016-04-14-11-12-52/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2016/04/2016-04-14-11-12-52.jpg” orig-size=“2560,1920”
When I separated my cat’s head from its body, the first five cervical vertebrae came with it. Never one to waste perfectly good cervicals, I prepped them as well as the skull. Here they are, nicely articulated. (Click through for high resolution.) Dorsal view at the top, then right lateral (actually, slightly dorsolateral) and ventral view at the bottom.
In my recent preprint on the incompleteness and distortion of sauropod neck specimens, I discuss three well-known sauropod specimens in detail, and show that they are not as well known as we think they are. One of them is the Giraffatitan brancai lectotype MB.R.2181 (more widely known by its older designation HMN SII), the specimen that provides the bulk of the mighty mounted skeleton in Berlin.
Since I posted my preprint “Almost all known sauropod necks are incomplete and distorted” and asked in the comments for people to let me know if I missed any good necks, the candidates have been absolutely rolling in: The Kaatedocus siberi holotype SMA 0004 (thanks to Oliver Demuth for pointing this out) The Futalognkosaurus dukei holotype MUCPv-323 (thanks to Matt Lamanna) The referred Rapetosaurus
Here at SV-POW! Towers, we’re keenly aware that some of our fans are just here for the hardcore sauropod vertebra action. These folks start to shift in their seats when we put up too many posts in a row on open access or rabbits or…okay, mostly just OA and bunnies. If that’s you – or, heck, even if it isn’t – your good day has come. Saddle up. Let’s ride.
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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