Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

Another raw photo from the road.

The Morrison fossils from the Oklahoma panhandle were dug up and prepped out by  WPA workers in the 1930s, and their preparation toolkit consisted of hammers, chisels, pen-knives, and sandpaper. (Feel free to take a minute if you need to get your nausea under control.) And whereas most Morrison fossils are much darker than the surrounding matrix, in the Oklahoma panhandle the bone and matrix are about the same color. Sometimes the prep guys didn’t know they’d gone too deep until they sanded into the trabecular bone. Or in this case, into the air spaces in the condyle of this anterior dorsal of Apatosaurus.

Still, we have lots of anterior dorsals of Apatosaurus, and very few we can see inside, and they’re too darned big to scan, so this gives us useful information that a more perfect specimen would not. So I salute you, underemployed dude from eighty-odd years ago. Thanks for showing me something cool.