Today sees the publication of my big paper with Mike on neural spine bifurcation, which has been in the works since last April. It’s a free download here, and as usual we put the hi-res figures and other supporting info on a sidebar page.

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For a paper that I and Matt are preparing, we needed to measure the centrum length of a bunch of turkey cervicals. That turns out to be harder than you’d think, because of the curious negative curvature of the articular surfaces.

Last Tuesday Mike popped up in Gchat to ask me about sauropod neck masses.  We started throwing around some numbers, derived from volumetric estimates and some off-the-cuff guessing.

In our PeerJ neck-anatomy paper, we speculated on how long individual cervical vertebrae might have grown. Here is the relevant section: Now this speculation is shot through with uncertainty. As we’ve discussed before, at length, all estimates of Amphicoelias fragillimus length and mass are wildly speculative; and Parrish’s allometry result was extrapolated from an unconvincingly small data set.

Here are cervical vertebrae 2-15 of Diplodocus carnegii in right lateral view, from Hatcher (1901: plate 3). Click to embiggen, and then just gaze in wonder for a while.

There’s a lot more Sauroposeidon material these days than there used to be, thanks to the referral by D’Emic and Foreman (2012) of Paluxysaurus and Ostrom’s Cloverly material and the new Cloverly material to my favorite sauropod genus.

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.

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A few weeks ago, we were considering the bizarre Umbaran Starfighter from The Clone Wars , and its extraordinary similarity to an Apatosaurus cervical: {.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-7368 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“7368” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2013/01/04/umbaran-starfighter-update/1322344262m_splash/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/1322344262m_splash.jpeg” orig-size=“500,355”