Denver Diplodocus
November 5, 2011
Taken by me–or rather, my camera in automatic mode–earlier today, because the ole sauropod blog has been a bit light on sauropods lately.
I spend a lot of time thinking about Sauroposeidon, Supersaurus, and the like. It’s good to be reminded that even an ‘average’ sauropod like Diplodocus is still pretty awesome. And weird. I don’t know if we can be reminded often enough.
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 
November 5, 2011 at 4:00 pm
Interesting to see what looks like a pronounced upward kink between cervicals 13 and 14, yet the zygapophyses seem reasonably overlapped. Were you able to see this closer up?
And is that the putative Brachiosaurus altithorax skull USNM 5730 over on the left? Please tell me you got some good photos.
November 5, 2011 at 6:44 pm
Maybe, yes, and I did. Sorry to be vague, but I am crunching through photos from this morning’s excavation. More soon!
November 5, 2011 at 7:37 pm
Awesome! Glad to see some more sauropod pics.
I agree that the kink in the neck is interesting–does this mount belong to a particular specimen, and has it been described in the literature?
Also, are those supposed to be gastralia or sternal ribs in the mount? Would these delimit the extent of the soft tissue of the stomach?
November 5, 2011 at 10:14 pm
Good to see you posting. I have followed SVPow for years.
Having very little luck tracking down Sonorasaurus… perhaps a musing post on Barachiosauroids/Titanosaurians from the mid-Cretaceous might be a delight for others besides just me.
November 6, 2011 at 10:43 pm
Zach, my understanding is that the Denver Diplodocus mount uses a cast of the CM 84 neck (i.e. the holotype of D. carnegii).
November 7, 2011 at 12:26 am
Zach, my understanding is that the Denver Diplodocus mount uses a cast of the CM 84 neck (i.e. the holotype of D. carnegii).
I’m pretty sure that’s not right. The neck looked like it had quite a bit of real bone in it, plus some plaster (or possibly fiberglass) reconstruction. I’ll post better pictures soon.
Irritatingly, I didn’t think I’d have a chance to hit the museum, so I left the good camera at home and just took my little point-n-shoot. So my pictures are on the sucky side, quality-wise. Total bush league mistake.
November 7, 2011 at 10:20 am
Hmm. It had better be right, otherwise those geniuses Taylor et al. (2009) were mistaken when they wrote (p. 216):
Hmm.
OK, looking back over my notes on that paper, I see I was working from an email sent by Jeff Martz, which quotes the DMNS online catalogue:
I’ve had a poke around on http://dmns.org/ but not been able to find the online catalog yet.
November 7, 2011 at 10:23 am
(The URL that Jeff gave for the online catalog was http://www.dmns.org/collections/ but the museum has evidently broken its web-site: that location is now redirected to http://www.dmns.org/science/web-collections which is itself a 404. The site-map at http://www.dmns.org/site-map does not mention any catalog at all.)
November 7, 2011 at 2:46 pm
All I know is that when I was standing directly underneath it, the neck did not seem to be a cast. It looked like real bone plus some reconstructed bits. Also, my off-the-cuff observation is that the verts don’t look particularly CM 84-ish; the neural spines in particular seem different. But I don’t have Hatcher right in front of me, either. This is going to be a hellish week in a hellish month for me, but I will try to get some better pictures posted soon.
November 9, 2011 at 8:46 pm
http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/101064
September 2, 2014 at 5:21 pm
Just wondered if anyone resolved the questions about the Denver Diplo’s cervicals. The plaque below the mounted specimen shows it in situ at DNM, and including five cervicals.
September 3, 2014 at 9:08 pm
Yep, we included an erratum regarding this in our report on the 2011 sauropod conference in Bonn.
September 4, 2014 at 4:15 am
Thanks so much. I asked Virginia Tidwell and understand the five posterior cervicals are included in the specimen and the mount. Well now I can sleep soundly again.
September 4, 2014 at 6:43 pm
Hmm. Just throughing out a (not so) random guess, but I’m thinking that the fantastic picture of the Denver Diplodocus mount is *gasp* not my Matt, is it?
September 4, 2014 at 6:44 pm
Oops, correction. I ment to type “not by Matt” not “not my Matt”. Stupid hard-to-press keys.