Last time, I showed you a photo of the head and neck of the London Diplodocus and asked what was wrong. Quite a few of you got it right (including Matt when we were chatting, but I asked him not to give it away by posting a comment). The 100 SV-POW! dollars, with their cash value of $0.00, go to Orribec, who was the first to reply that the atlas (cervical 1) is upside-down.

Last Saturday I was at a wedding at Holy Trinity Brompton, a London church that is conveniently located a ten-minute stroll from the Natural History Museum. As I am currently working on a history paper concerning the Carnegie Diplodocus , I persuaded my wife, my eldest son and his fiancée to join me for a quick scoot around the “Dippy Returns” exhibition.

You’ll remember that we’ve been playing with CM 555, a subadult apatosaurine of indeterminate species, though John McIntosh assigned it to Brontosaurus (then Apatosaurus ) excelsus . At the start of the week, we had the centra and neural arches of cervicals 1-14, plus there were some appendicular elements on a shelf that we’d not yet gone to. But then today, Matt found this drawer: {.alignnone .wp-image-15853 .size-full

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.

We have good descriptions of the proximal parts of the cervical ribs for lots of sauropods.