Merry Christmas from SV-POW!
December 24, 2007
The famous (infamous?) AMNH Barosaurus, from an angle you may not have seen before. There’s a very subtle problem here–both this skeleton (the “mommy”) and the juvenile hiding behind it (the “baby”) are reconstructed with 17 cervicals, although to the best of anyone’s knowledge, Barosaurus only had 16. Nitpicky? Sure. But to me, making an already ridiculously long-necked dinosaur even more outrageous by sneaking in an extra vertebra is–at the risk of offending the British 2/3 of the SV-POW! creative team–just not cricket.
Stay tuned during 2008–we’ll see if the three of us can keep this up for an entire calendar year.
Cheers,
Matt (and Mike and Darren)
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 
December 25, 2007 at 5:23 am
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to Darren, Mike and Matt, the mighty SV-POW! team.
Great pic. Very vertiginous.
December 25, 2007 at 1:35 pm
It puts the ‘vert’ in vertiginous, all right.
December 26, 2007 at 5:38 pm
Pshaw! Everyone knows the 17th cervical was cartaliginous!
December 28, 2007 at 7:55 pm
So, how many cervicals does Mamenchisaurus have? I have a vague memory of counting, and counting the cervicals in as many other sauropods as I could find good pictures of: M had the most. AND the variation of length along the series seemed funny: I ended up wondering if the specific name “constructus” (supposedly given because the bones were found during the excavation for some construction project) might not have a a second, ironic, interpretation.
February 26, 2009 at 5:45 am
[…] the individual vertebrae crazy long. Diplodocids recruited dorsals into the neck, and some (like Barosaurus and Supersaurus) also made the vertebrae crazy long. Mamenchisaurids and Euhelopus added cervicals […]
April 5, 2012 at 3:09 am
[…] is the mostly-complete skeleton famously mounted in a rearing pose in the AMNH rotunda. McIntosh (2005:47-48): The neural spine of cervical 8 is flat across the top, […]