Let’s say you had a critter with weird neural canals and super-deeply-dished-in centrum-ends, and you wanted to digitally rearticulate the vertebrae and reconstruct the spinal cord and intervertebral cartilages, in a project that would bring together a bunch of arcane stuff that you’d been noodling about for years.

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Peter Falkingham and Nick Gardner independently put me onto Sketchfab: a website that provides a way to view and navigate 3D models without needing to download any software beyond the browser that you’re already running. So get yourself over to the live Xenoposeidon model!

In writing the recent preprint “ Xenoposeidon is the earliest known rebbachisaurid sauropod dinosaur” (Taylor 2017), it was invaluable to have a 3D model of the Xenoposeidon vertebra available. Here’s a short clip of viewing the model in the free MeshLab program.