Beware over-interpreting photos of fossils

Welcome to 2017! Let's start the year with a cautionary tale. I'll leap straight to the moral, then give an example: it's very easy to reach the wrong conclusion about fossils from photos. That's because no single photo can give an accurate impression of distortion. For that, you need at least a much bigger selection of photos; or better still, a 3d model; or of course best of all, the fossil itself.

Here's the motivating example:

A correspondent — I will not divulge his or her name unless the person in question chooses to reveal it — had looked over the slides for our 2016 SVPCA talk on new Barosaurus specimens, which claims that Jensen's Dry Mesa "Supersaurus" cervical BYU 9024 actually belongs to Barosaurus.

Matt and I felt, based largely on the degree of neural spine bifurcation, that the BYU vertebra compares most similarly to C9 of the AMNH specimen — the middle one in the top row of the composite illustration above. But my correspondent put together the composite, and wrote [lightly edited for clarity]:

I've already compared BYU 9024 with the AMNH cervicals, I attach a photo, because for me it is also very similar to C14: the centrum is much more similar to C14 than C9, I think. What do you think about this?