Skyward!
October 8, 2007
This one’s not about the morphology of the vertebrae, but rather their cumulative effect. The subject is the mounted Brachiosaurus outside the Field Museum in Chicago. The picture was taken in July 2005 by me or by Mike; we had two Nikon Coolpix cameras going and just pooled the photos.
We’ll get you some sacrals, caudals, and non-brachiosaurids one of these days. We swear.
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 
October 9, 2007 at 9:24 am
Spectacular! It looks disturbingly like a sadistic Jurassic roller-coaster.
October 9, 2007 at 8:56 pm
Hi guys, just wanted to say congrats on the site. Very nice! Glad to see you spreading the word, though I might have to retaliate with ‘Jehol Picture of the Week’ or ‘Pterosaur Skull of the Week’ at some point!
Let me know if you need any pictures! ;-)
Dave
October 9, 2007 at 9:13 pm
Hi, Dave, good to hear from you. No doubt you can easily feel our jealousy rays radiating out at you over there in the land of absurdly preserved fossils. Believe me, no-one would be happier to see a Jehol Picture of the Week blog than I would! And, yes, please bung and nice sauropod vertebra photos you take in our directions, it’ll be nice to vary things a little from our natural areas of the Wealden (Darren and me) and Early Cretaceous North America (Matt). In fact, it’s all a bit Earlycretaceoustastic around here.
October 10, 2007 at 8:36 am
Dave has already sent me some shots of Huanghetitan ruyangensis that I’ll use here some time. Having said that though, I’ve already used them on Tet Zoo.
October 10, 2007 at 1:11 pm
I’d like to know more about the effect the vertebrae have on how far back our sauropod friends could move their necks. My neck has a pretty decent range of motion…how would it compare to the range of motion in a sauropod’s neck. Does it have to do the attachment site of the neck to the body?
Thanks again!
Amanda
October 10, 2007 at 4:38 pm
” I might have to retaliate with ‘Jehol Picture of the Week’ or ‘Pterosaur Skull of the Week’ “
October 10, 2007 at 4:39 pm
” I might have to retaliate with ‘Jehol Picture of the Week’ or ‘Pterosaur Skull of the Week’ “
[Fx: drool]
October 11, 2007 at 11:22 am
Amanda,
Your question about the range of neck movement that is allowed by the cervical vertebrae has been addressed in some detail in a series of papers by Kent Stevens and Michael Parrish, beginning with a three-pager in Science in 1999. We’ll cover this in a subsequent post.
October 11, 2007 at 11:34 am
A skull! A skull! Huzzah! Congradulations to whoever took the shot, It’a a beauty.
November 17, 2007 at 3:17 am
Now hold on. Is that Brachiosaurus or Giraffititan?
November 17, 2007 at 8:39 am
Hi Graeme. Right now, the safest thing to say is that the neck is Brachiosaurus brancai — the name Giraffatitan as proposed by Paul (1988) as a subgenus for this species, and raised to the rank of genus by Olshevsky (1991) but it’s not been used subsequently except on the Internet. But whatever you call it, that species — the African brachiosaur from Tendaguru — is the source of pretty much all our knowledge of brachiosaur necks and skulls. (From North America there are a few isolated brachiosaur cervicals in the process of being described, and a single skull described by Carpenter and Tidwell (1998) which may be that of Brachiosaurus altithorax.)
May 21, 2014 at 11:04 am
[…] were idiots back when we visited Chicago, so our photos are mostly useless. We have lots that show the mounted skeleton as art, but very few that are scientifically useful. But what you can make out from the photo above […]