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

Order up! Sauroposeidon is stitched together from orthographic views of the 3D photogrammetric models rendered in MeshLab. Greyed out bits of the vertebrae are actually missing–I used C8 to patch C7, C7 to patch C6, and so on forward. The cervical ribs as reconstructed here were all recovered and they are in collections, but they’re in several jackets and boxes and therefore not easily photographed.

I was in Oklahoma and Texas last week, seeing Sauroposeidon, Paluxysaurus, Astrophocaudia, and Alamosaurus, at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History, the Shuler Museum of Paleontology at SMU, and the Perot Museum of Nature and Science, respectively.

As a break from photography posts, here are four pretty big vertebrae that swirl in the same thought-space in my head. All are shown to scale, in right lateral view.

Following on from Matt’s post about the difficulty of photographing big specimens without distortion, I thought I’d have a play with our best Sauroposeidon C8 photo, which I think is this one: (That’s been the basis for classic SV-POW!

Here are two photos of what I infer to be C8 of OMNH 53062, the holotype of Sauroposeidon . The top one was taken by Mike during our visit to the OMNH in 2007. If you’re a regular you may recognize it from several older posts: 1, 2, 3. The bottom one was taken by Mike Callaghan, the former museum photographer at the OMNH, sometime in 1999 or 2000.

Last time, we looked at how including intervertebral cartilage changes the neutral pose of a neck — or, more specifically, of the sequence of cervical vertebrae.

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.

Now this is super-freakin’ cool, and I’ve been meaning to blog about it for a while.