Last time, I asked if anyone has dorsal-view photos of the cervical vertebrae of Diplodocus . No responses yet, and I do urge you to chip in if you have any ideas. But here’s something to keep us positive: Apatosaurus cervicals!

In his classic monograph, Hatcher (1901) illustrated the cervical vertebrae of the Diplodocus carnegii holotype CM 84 with beautiful drawings: {.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-8014 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“8014” permalink=“http://svpow.com/papers-by-sv-powsketeers/wedel-and-taylor-2013-on-sauropod-neural-spine-bifurcation/wedel-and-taylor-2013-bifurcation-figure-13-diplodocus-cervicals-from-hatcher/”

From The Dinosaur Heresies. Part 1.

Up top there is a commercially obtained cast sculpture of a thumb claw of Megaraptor. Down below is an unpainted urethane cast of one of my favorite inanimate objects in the universe: OMNH 780, a thumb claw of Saurophaganax.

{.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-8217 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“8217” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2013/04/08/night-at-the-museum-lacms-camp-dino/lacm-dino-camp-3-mamenchisaurus-and-triceratops-1/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/lacm-dino-camp-3-mamenchisaurus-and-triceratops-1.jpg” orig-size=“2100,1575” comments-opened=“1”

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Here’s an update from the road–get ready for some crappy raw images, because that’s all I have the time or energy to post (with one exception). {.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-8148 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“8148” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2013/03/24/omnh-1331-is-my-new-hero/omnh-1331/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/omnh-1331.jpg” orig-size=“2272,1704” comments-opened=“1”

The original version of the PDF of our new paper (Wedel and Taylor 2013) had a couple of obvious errors: Kaatedocus was misspelled in the caption to Figure 7 (as Kaatedocu), and the submission date was given as June 24, 2012, not the correct date of June 14. Both of these errors were introduced during […]

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.

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.