Get down, get fuzzy, speculative juvenile Apatosaurus!
February 27, 2013
Well, this is rad. And adorable. Brian Switek, whom we adore, commissioned a fuzzy juvenile sauropod from Niroot, whom we adore, for his (Brian’s) upcoming book, My Beloved Brontosaurus, which I am gearing up to adore. And here is the result, which I adore, borrowed with permission from Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs.
There is much to like here. Here’s my rundown:
- Small forefeet that are the correct shape: good. Maybe too small, given that young animals often have big feet. But better too small than too big, given how often people screw this up.
- Pronounced forelimb-hindlimb disparity: win.
- Fat neck: pretty good.
In fact, let me interrupt the flow of praise here to put in Brant Bassam’s dorsal view of his mounted Phil Platt model Apatosaurus skeleton. I’ve been meaning to post about this for a while now and haven’t gotten to it, so now’s a good time: just look at how friggin’ FAT that neck is, and how it blends in with the body, and how the tail gets a lot skinnier a lot quicker (and, yeah, caudofemoralis, but not that much). Now, go look at a bunch of life restorations of Apatosaurus–drawings, paintings, sculptures, toys, whatever–and see how many people get this wrong, by giving Apatosaurus a too-skinny neck. The answer is, damn near everyone.
Apatosaurus lousiae 1/12 scale skeleton in dorsal view, modelled by Phil Platt, assembled and photographed by Brant Bassam. Image courtesy of BrantWorks.com.
Okay, back to Niroot’s baby:
- Proportionally shorter neck and tail because it’s a juvenile: win.
- Neck wrinkles possibly corresponding to vertebrae: okay, just this once.
- Greenish fuzz possibly functioning as camouflage: We-ell…
Yes, it’s true that all of the known sauropod skin impressions show scales, not fuzz. But. We don’t have anything like full-body coverage. And I suspect that there is a collection bias against fuzzy skin impressions. Scaly skin impressions are probably easier to recognize than 3D feathery skin impressions (as opposed to feathers preserved flat as at Liaoning and Solnhofen) because the latter probably just look like wavy patterns on rock, and who is looking for feather impressions when swinging a pickaxe at a sauropod’s back end? And how many sauropods get buried in circumstances delicate enough to preserve dinofuzz anyway? Also, some kind of fuzz is probably primitive for Ornithodira, and scales do not necessarily indicate that feathers were absent because owl legs. So is this speculative? Yes. Is it out of the question? I think not. In the spirit of Mythbusters, I’m calling it ‘plausible’.
Oh, one more thing: Niroot posted this in honor of Brian Switek’s birthday. Happy birthday, Brian! (You owe me a book!)
Terrifying actual cervical vertebrae of the Morrison Formation
February 17, 2013
If you found the hypothetical Amphicoelias fragillimus cervical in a recent post a bit too much to swallow, I won’t blame you. But how big do we know Morrison diplodocoid cervicals got?
The longest centrum of any specimen of anything, anywhere, is that of the cervical vertebra BYU 9024 that’s part of the Supersaurus vivianae holotype. It’s 138 cm long, which means that composited at scale with an MTSRSU, it looks like this:
This is not hypothetical. It’s an actual fossil.
(Just for the record: C8 of the Sauroposeidon holotype OMNH 53062 is slightly longer overall, at 140 cm. But that includes overhanging prezygapophyses. Its centrum is “only” 125 cm long.)
Terrifying hypothetical cervical vertebrae of the Morrison Formation
February 13, 2013
In our PeerJ neck-anatomy paper, we speculated on how long individual cervical vertebrae might have grown. Here is the relevant section:
Mere isometric scaling would of course suffice for larger animals to have longer necks, but Parrish (2006, p. 213) found a stronger result: that neck length is positively allometric with respect to body size in sauropods, varying with torso length to the power 1.35. This suggests that the necks of super-giant sauropods may have been even longer than imagined: Carpenter (2006, p. 133) estimated the neck length of the apocryphal giant Amphicoelias fragillimus Cope, 1878 as 16.75 m, 2.21 times the length of 7.5 m used for Diplodocus, but if Parrish’s allometric curve pertained then the true value would have been 2.21^1.35 = 2.92 times as long as the neck of Diplodocus, or 21.9 m; and the longest single vertebra would have been 187 cm long.
Now this speculation is shot through with uncertainty. As we’ve discussed before, at length, all estimates of Amphicoelias fragillimus length and mass are wildly speculative; and Parrish’s allometry result was extrapolated from an unconvincingly small data set. But still, these numbers are probably the best we can do with what we have.
In Diplodocus carnegii, C14 is the longest individual vertebra at 642 mm long (Hatcher 1901, p. 38). The Amphicoelias:Diplodocus size ratio of 2.21 from Carpenter and the neck allometry constant of 1.35 from Parrish suggest that the corresponding vertebra in the big boy would have been 2.92 times as long as that 642 mm, hence the 187 cm that we reported.
So what does a 187-cm long cervical vertebra look like? Scaling up from the Diplodocus carnegii C14 in Hatcher (1901: plate III) and using my good self as a scalebar, here it is:
I find that just a little bit frightening. In more ways than one.
References
- Carpenter, Kenneth. 2006 Biggest of the big: a critical re-evaluation of the mega-sauropod Amphicoelias fragillimus (Cope, 1878). New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science Bulletin 36:131.
- Cope, Edward D. 1878. Geology and paleontology: a new species of Amphicoelias. The American Naturalist 12:563.
- Hatcher, Jonathan B. 1901. Diplodocus (Marsh): its osteology, taxonomy and probable habits, with a restoration of the skeleton. Memoirs of the Carnegie Museum 1:1-63 and plates I-XIII.
- Parrish, J. Michael. 2006. The origins of high browsing and the effects of phylogeny and scaling on neck length in sauropodomorphs. pp 201-224 in: Amniote paleobiology, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
PeerJ launches today! (and we’re in it!)
February 12, 2013
Apatosaurus lousiae 1/12 scale skeleton in left antero-lateral view, modelled by Phil Platt, assembled and photographed by Brant Bassam. Image courtesy of BrantWorks.com.
Today our paper on sauropod neck anatomy is formally published in PeerJ.
There’s not much new to say about the paper, since we posted it to arXiv last year and told the world about it then (post 1, post 2, post 3). Although a lot more attractive in form, this version is almost identical in content, modulo some changes requested by the PeerJ reviewers, and some changes to the figures to make sure every part of every figure was CC BY or otherwise in the public domain. Many thanks to everyone who gave us permission to use their images, especially Scott Hartman, who is rapidly getting to be the go-to person for this sort of thing just by doing good work and being a nice guy.
The big news, of course, is not the paper but the outlet. We’re excited about PeerJ because it promises to be a game-changer, for lots of reasons. Mike has a nice article in the Guardian today about the thing that is getting the most attention, which is the cost to publish. I blogged about it last fall, when I bought the max bling lifetime membership–for about one-tenth of the OA publication fee for a single article from one of the big barrier-based publishers.
Apatosaurus lousiae 1/12 scale skeleton in left lateral view, modelled by Phil Platt, assembled and photographed by Brant Bassam. Image courtesy of BrantWorks.com.
Then there’s turnaround time: for our paper, a mere 72 days, including both submission day (Dec. 3) and publication day (Feb. 12). My fastest turnaround before this was 73 days for my sauropod nerve paper, but that was from submission to posting of the accepted manuscript, not publication of the final version of record. Prior to that I’d had a couple of papers published within six months of submission, but that was definitely the exception rather than the rule. And sadly, I’ve had several situations now where a paper languished in peer review for six months.
And that brings me to peer review–the real “peer” in PeerJ. When you sign up a lifetime membership, you agree to review one paper a year for them to keep your membership active. Certainly not a crushing amount of work, especially since I’ve been averaging 5 or 6 reviews a year for much less congenial outlets.
I’ve seen this from both sides now, since I was tapped to review a manuscript for PeerJ back in December. The first thing I liked is that they asked for the review back within 10 days. That’s just about right. I can see a thorough review taking three days (not working straight through, obviously, but taking time to carefully read, digest, look stuff up, and compose the review), and a busy academic maybe needing a week to find that kind of time. If one is too busy to get it done within 10 days, better to just be honest, say that, and decline the review. There is certainly no reason to let reviewers have manuscripts for four to six weeks, let alone the three to four months that was standard when I got into this business.
Apatosaurus lousiae 1/12 scale skeleton in dorsal view, modelled by Phil Platt, assembled and photographed by Brant Bassam. Image courtesy of BrantWorks.com.
The second thing I liked is that they gave me the option to sign the review (which is almost always implicitly present, whether reviewers take advantage of it or not), and they gave the authors of the manuscript the option to publish my review alongside the paper. I love that. It means that, for the first time ever*, maybe the time and effort I put into the review will not disappear without a trace after I send it off. (It is astonishingly wasteful that we write these detailed technical critiques and then consign them to never be seen by any but a handful of people.) And it had a salutary effect on my reviewing. I always strive to be thoughtful and constructive in my reviews, but the knowledge that this review might be published for the world to see made me a lot more careful, both in what I said and how I said it. Hopefully, the authors I reviewed for will opt to publish my review, so you will be able to judge for yourself whether I succeeded–I’ll keep you posted on that. UPDATE: Hooray! The paper is out, and it’s a beaut, and the authors did publish the review history, which is excellent. The paper is Schachner et al. (2013), “Pulmonary anatomy in the Nile crocodile and the evolution of unidirectional airflow in Archosauria”, the reviews by Pat O’Connor and myself and the author responses and the editor’s letters are all available by clicking the “Peer review history” link on the sidebar, and you should go read all of it right now.
* There are a bare handful of other outlets that publish reviews alongside papers, but I’ve never been tapped to review for them, so this was my first experience with a peer review that might be published.
Naturally Mike and I took the maximum openness option and had our reviews and all the rest of the paper trail published alongside our paper, and I intend to do this every time from here on out. As far as I’m concerned, the benefits of open peer review massively outweigh those from anonymous peer review. There will always be a few jackasses in the world, and if openness itself doesn’t force better behavior out of them, at least they’ll be easier to identify and route around in an open world. Anyway, to see our reviews, expand ‘Author and article information’ at the top of this page, and click the link in the green box that says, “The authors have chosen to make the review history of this article public.”
One happy result of this will manifest in just a few weeks. Bunny-wrangler and sometime elephant-tracker Brian Kraatz and I co-teach a research capstone course for the MS students at WesternU, and one of the things we cover is peer review. Last year I had to dig up a couple of my reviews that were sufficiently old and anonymous that no harm could come from sharing them with the students, but even so, they only got half the story, because I no longer had the manuscripts and couldn’t have shared them if I had. This year I’ll be able to point the students at PeerJ and say, “Go look. There’s the back-and-forth. That’s how we do this. Now you know.”
Science, process and product alike, out in the open, freely available to the world: that’s why I’m proud to be a member of PeerJ.
(And I haven’t even mentioned the preprint server, or all the thought the PeerJ team put into the graphic design of the papers themselves, or how responsive the production team was in helping us get the finished product just right, or….)
Apatosaurus lousiae 1/12 scale skeleton in left postero-lateral view, modelled by Phil Platt, assembled and photographed by Brant Bassam. Image courtesy of BrantWorks.com.
The pictures in this post have nothing to do with our paper, other than showing off one of the beautiful products of the factors we discuss therein. The images are all borrowed from Brant Bassam’s amazing BrantWorks, which we will definitely be discussing more in the future. Explicit permission to reproduce the images with credit can be found on this page. Thanks, Brant!
UPDATE: Bonus Figure
This special version of Figure 3 from our new paper goes out to Dean, who inspired it with this comment. As Tony Stark said, “It’s like Christmas, only with more…me.” Click to enWedelate.
A selection of Matt Wedels (6’2″ or 1.88m tall) with various long-necked amniotes for scale.
Diplodocus carnegii cervicals, from Hatcher (1901)
February 7, 2013
Here are cervical vertebrae 2-15 of Diplodocus carnegii in right lateral view, from Hatcher (1901: plate 3). Click to embiggen, and then just gaze in wonder for a while.
Wouldn’t that look smashing, printed, framed, and hanging on the wall?
I wonder if I will ever stop finding new interesting things to think about in this image. I doubt it.
(For a bit o’ fair-and-balanced, remember that this neck may not be complete, and that some of the neural spines are sculptures.)
Thanks to Mike for the scan.
Reference
Hatcher, John Bell. 1901. Diplodocus (Marsh): its osteology, taxonomy, and probable habits, with a restoration of the skeleton. Memoirs of the Carnegie Museum 1:1-63.
CONFIRMED: the Umbaran Starfighter is an Apatosaurus cervical
January 21, 2013
The last time we reported on the Apatosaurus cervical-shaped Umbaran Starfight from The Clone Wars, we’d heard from the concept artist Russell G. Chong, who had done the final design on the startfighter, and who told that he wasn’t aware of a sauropod original to the design.
But Russell was not the original designer. He put me onto David Hobbins, who had generated the original rough design that he’d honed. I wrote to David early in January to find out more:
Date: 4 January 2013 22:57
From: Mike Taylor <mike@indexdata.com>
To: David Hobbins
Subject: Is the Umbaran Starfighter from Clone Wars inspired by an Apatosaurus vertebra?Hi, David. You don’t know me, but I was put onto you by Russell G. Chong. Matt Wedel and I are palaeontologists, specialising in the neck skeletons of sauropod dinosaurs. Matt noticed that the Umbaran Starfighter seems to be closely modelled on an Apatosaurus vertebra – see these four blog posts [1, 2, 3, 4] (You don’t need to read them all, the first one gives the flavour.)
We’re trying to figure out whether this is deliberate as it appears, or just a crazy coincidence. The design was finished by Russell, but he wasn’t its originator, and thinks you might be the man — or know who was.
Can you comment?
David wrote back a few days ago. Here is his message (reproduced with permission):
Date: 16 January 2013 15:58
From: David Hobbins
To: Mike Taylor <mike@indexdata.com>
Subject: Re: Is the Umbaran Starfighter from Clone Wars inspired by an Apatosaurus vertebra?Hi Mike,
I read the blog posts — interesting commentary! I remember the original design perfectly, and you are absolutely right, I was inspired by the skeletal forms of dinosaur bones. It’s pretty cool that you were able to discern that!
I’ve looked for the original photo I took of the vertebra, but it seems to be lost in the archives. I can’t confirm that it was of an Apatosaurus vertebra exactly, but it’s quite possible. I was at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco and took a number of photos that day.
Nature renders complex and beautiful designs; I often find myself drawn to studying organic forms and patterns as inspiration in my vehicle designs.
And he clarified in a subsequent message:
Date: 16 January 2013 20:51
From: David Hobbins
To: Mike Taylor <mike@indexdata.com>
Subject: Re: Is the Umbaran Starfighter from Clone Wars inspired by an Apatosaurus vertebra?The bone was presented as a single vertebra on public display. I’m uncertain that the collection will be the same now. I took the photo back in 2007 just before the California Academy of Sciences moved into their present location in Golden Gate Park. I’m sure there have been a lot of changes since.
I will continue the search for the original photo. Will let you know right away if I find anything.
So this is great news! Matt’s initial hypothesis is confirmed from the horse’s mouth. All we need to wrap this investigation up is a photo of the original exhibit.
Does anyone out there have a photo of an isolated Apatosaurus vertebra that was on exhibit at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco before it moved to Golden Gate Park? Or does anyone know someone who works at CAoS that we could talk to?
Update (later the same day)
This discovery has been covered at sci-fi fan site io9!
The rest of the posts in what we’re calling the Umbaran Starfighter Saga:
- Was the Umbaran Starfighter from Clone Wars inspired by an Apatosaurus vertebra? (Dec. 13, 2012)
- Heck, yes, the Umbaran Starfighter from Clone Wars was inspired by an Apatosaurus vertebra (Dec. 15, 2012)
- Umbaran Starfighter vs. Apatosaurus cervical, round 3 (Dec. 16, 2012)
- Umbaran Starfighter update (Jan. 4, 2013)
Umbaran Starfighter update
January 4, 2013
A few weeks ago, we were considering the bizarre Umbaran Starfighter from The Clone Wars, and its extraordinary similarity to an Apatosaurus cervical:
In a comment, Kyle Hartshorn suggested:
The Clone Wars “Plan of Dissent” episode concept art gallery features some conceptart of the starfighter, with the artist initials “RGC”. I believe that’s Russell G. Chong, one of the show’s art designers. You can find his contact information at his website.
He might not be the one who came up with the design–that art looks too polished to be an early concept—but he would probably know who did.
Nice detective work.
Here’s some of that concept art:
I found an email address for Chong, and wrote to him:
Hi, Russell. Matt Wedel and I are palaeontologists, specialising in the neck skeletons of sauropod dinosaurs. Matt noticed that the Umbaran Starfighter seems to be closely modelled on an Apatosaurus vertebra — see these two blog posts.
We’re trying to figure out whether this is deliberate as it appears, or just a crazy coincidence. One of our commenters believes the design might be yours — can you comment?
Russell was on vacation for a while, but wrote back a couple of days ago. I quote his message with permission:
Hey Mike,
I’ve been away on vacation and I just found this email.
That’s pretty trippy that the vertebrate looks so similar.
It’s also pretty trippy that palaeontologists are watching clone wars.
I did have the final design for this ship but I didn’t do the original ‘inspirational’ sketch. George often goes thru a book of older sketches from the movies and randomly picks stuffout for us to ‘fix’ or ‘cleanup’. My input was to give it more extreme character so I sharpened some edges and made the fins more pronounced, figured out how to land it, design a working cockpit, and then gave it final color. I don’t know who did the original but I don’t recall any notation saying they based it on the Aptosaurus vertebra so I have to say, yes, it’s coincidental.
Similarities are really odd!
Russell also gave me a lead on where I might look for the original designer. I’ll follow that up, and report back in a later post.
Update
Victory! For the full saga, check out these links:
- Was the Umbaran Starfighter from Clone Wars inspired by an Apatosaurus vertebra? (Dec. 13, 2012)
- Heck, yes, the Umbaran Starfighter from Clone Wars was inspired by an Apatosaurus vertebra (Dec. 15, 2012)
- Umbaran Starfighter vs. Apatosaurus cervical, round 3 (Dec. 16, 2012)
- CONFIRMED: the Umbaran Starfighter is an Apatosaurus cervical (Jan. 21, 2013)
Ending on a high note
December 31, 2012
We’ve gotten a few complaints this year about how much time we’ve spent talking about open access instead of dinosaurs. Brian Engh is in the more-dinosaurs faction, but he doesn’t just whinge about our non-dino coverage, he does something about it. He writes:
here’s the deal:
when sv-pow becomes more discussion about human things and less discussion about ancient monsters i bombard your email with whatever crappy unfinished dino-drawings i got lying around. you have my permission to do with these as you wish, however if they end up on SV-POW i will be happy and feel i’m doing my part to combat humans.
Awesome.
Happy new year, sauropod fans. Enjoy this rearing Dicraeosaurus courtesy of Brian.
Welcome Kaatedocus: this is how to illustrate a sauropod
December 20, 2012
A couple of days ago, a paper by Tschopp and Mateus (2012) described and named a new diplodocine from the Morrison Formation, Kaatedocus siberi, based on a beautifully preserved specimen consisting of a complete skull and the first fourteen cervical vertebrae.
Unfortunately, the authors chose to publish their work in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology, a paywalled journal, which means that most of you reading this will be unable to read the actual paper — at least, not unless you care enough to pay £27 for the privilege.
So you’ll just have to take my word for it when I tell you that it’s a fine, detailed piece of work, weighing in at 36 pages. It features lavish illustrations of the skull, but we won’t trouble you with those. The vertebrae are illustrated rather less comprehensively, though still better than in most papers:
Tschopp and Matteus (2012: figure 9). A, Photograph and B, drawings of the mid-cervical vertebrae of the holotype of Kaatedocus siberi (SMA 0004). Photograph in lateral view and to scale, CV 8 shown in the drawings is indicated by an asterisk. Drawings of CV 8 (B) in dorsal (1), lateral (2), ventral (3), posterior (4) and anterior (5) views. Scale bars = 4 cm.
It should be immediately apparent from these lateral views that the vertebra are rather Diplodocus-like. But the hot news is that there is a great raft of free supplementary information, including full five-orthogonal-view photos of all fourteen vertebrae!
Here is just one of them, C6, in glorious high resolution (click through for the full awesome):
Now, folks, that is how to illustrate a sauropod in 2012! The goal of a good descriptive paper is to be the closest thing possible to a proxy for the specimen itself, and you just can’t do that if you don’t illustrate every element from multiple directions. By getting this so spectacularly right, Tschopp and Matteus have made their paper the best illustrated sauropod descriptions for 91 years. (Yes, I am talking about Osborn and Mook 1921.)
It’s just a shame that all the awe-inspiring illustrations are tucked away in supplementary information rather than in the paper itself. Had the paper been published in a PLOS journal, for example, all the goodness could have been in one place, and it would all have been open access.
Is Kaatedocus valid?
There’s a bit of a fashion these days for drive-by synonymisation of dinosaurs, and sure enough no sooner had Brian Switek written about Kaatedocus for his new National Geographic blog than comments started cropping up arguing (or in some cases just stating) that Kaatedocus is merely Barosaurus.
It’s not. I spent a lot of time with true Barosaurus cervicals at Yale this summer, and those of Kaatedocus are nothing like them. Here is Tschopp and Mateus’s supplementary figure of C14:
And here is a posterior vertebra — possibly also C14 — of the Barosaurus holotype YPM 429, in dorsal and right lateral views:
Even allowing for a certain amount of post-mortem distortion and “creative” restoration, it should be immediately apparent that (A) Barosaurus is much weirder than most people realise, and (B) Kaatedocus ain’t it.
There may be more of a case to be made that Kaatedocus is Diplodocus — but that’s the point: it there’s a case, then it needs to be actually made, which means a point-by-point response to the diagnostic characters proposed by the authors in their careful, detailed study based on months of work with the actual specimens.
There seems to be an idea abroad at the moment that it’s somehow more conservative or sober or scientific to assume everything is a ontogenomorph of everything else — possibly catalysed by the Horner lab’s ongoing “Toroceratops” initiative and subsequent cavalier treatment of Morrison sauropods — maybe even by the Amphidocobrontowaassea paper. Folks, there is no intrinsic merit in assuming less diversity. Historically, the Victorian sauropod palaeontologists of England did at least as much taxonomic damage by assumptions of synonymy (everything’s Cetiosaurus or Ornithopsis — whatever that is) as they did by raising new taxa. The thing to do is find the hypothesis best supported by evidence, not presupposing that either splitting or lumping is a priori the more virtuous course.
Sermon ends.
Morrison sauropod diversity
As we’ve pointed out a few times in our published work, sauropod diversity in the Kimmeridgian-Tithonian in general, and in the Morrison Formation in particular, was off-the-scale crazy. There’s good evidence for at least a dozen sauropod genera in the Morrison, and more than fifteen species. Kaatedocus extends this record yet further, giving us a picture of an amazing ecosystem positively abundant with numerous species of giant animals bigger than anything alive on land today.
Sometimes you’ll hear people use this observation as a working-backwards piece of evidence that Morrison sauropods are oversplit. Nuh-uh. We have to assess taxonomy on its own grounds, then see what it tells us about ecosystem. As Dave Hone’s new paper affirms (among many others), Mesozoic ecosystem were not like modern ones. We have to resist the insidious temptation to assume that what we would have seen in the Late Jurassic is somehow analogous to what we see today on the Serengeti.
Hutton’s (or Lyell’s) idea that “the present is the key to the past” may be helpful in geology. But despite its roots as a branch of the discipline, the palaeontology we do today is not geology. When we’re thinking about ancient ecosystems, we’re talking about palaeobiology, and in that field the idea that the present is the key to the past is at best unhelpful, at worst positively misleading.
Sermon ends.
But isn’t the Kaatedocus holotype privately owned?
You’ve had two sermons already, I’m sure we can all agree that’s plenty for one blog post. I will return to this subject in a subsequent post.
Sermon doesn’t even get started.
References
Umbaran Starfighter vs. Apatosaurus cervical, round 3
December 16, 2012
Just sayin’:
![gallery15[1]](http://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/gallery151.jpg)
vs.
(From here.)
Update
The rest of the Umbaran Starfighter Saga:
- Was the Umbaran Starfighter from Clone Wars inspired by an Apatosaurus vertebra? (Dec. 13, 2012)
- Heck, yes, the Umbaran Starfighter from Clone Wars was inspired by an Apatosaurus vertebra (Dec. 15, 2012)
- Umbaran Starfighter update (Jan. 4, 2013)
- CONFIRMED: the Umbaran Starfighter is an Apatosaurus cervical (Jan. 21, 2013)
