One articulated Sauroposeidon to go, hold the perspective distortion, with a side of stinkin’ mammal
April 24, 2014
Order up!
Sauroposeidon is stitched together from orthographic views of the 3D photogrammetric models rendered in MeshLab. Greyed out bits of the vertebrae are actually missing–I used C8 to patch C7, C7 to patch C6, and so on forward. The cervical ribs as reconstructed here were all recovered and they are in collections, but they’re in several jackets and boxes and therefore not easily photographed.
The meter bars are both one meter as advertised. The giraffe neck is FMNH 34426 (from this post), which is actually 1.7 meters long, but I scaled it up to 2.4 meters to match that of the tallest known giraffe. I think it’s cool that a world-record giraffe neck is roughly as long as two vertebrae from the middle of the neck of Sauroposeidon.
There are loads of little morphological details in the Sauroposeidon vertebrae that are clearer now than they were in our old photographs, but those will be stories for other posts.
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 
April 24, 2014 at 5:40 pm
I loved the wit applied to reconstruction. I think there is a growing distrust to using reconstructions in the “hard” paleontology (ie papers etc) But it is undeniable the contribution that gives an overall picture
April 24, 2014 at 9:24 pm
Better Sauroposeidon photo I ve ever see!
Compliment !
April 25, 2014 at 8:55 am
But, paleomanuel, this may be literally the sauropod-specimen image that involves the least “art” of any that’s ever been published, since it eliminates the perspective distortion that is so ubiquitous and significant in photos of large objects.
April 25, 2014 at 2:11 pm
Mike I’m celebrating the composite nature of this pic, the proper use of known parts to patch others, and above all the chance to see all the fossils at once, articulated and undistorted (all of this using photos, not drawings!)
Losing that omnipresent distortion is really great!
Sorry if I misspelled the previous comment
July 13, 2015 at 4:32 am
[…] died. But it was a big baby; the centrum is maybe just a hair under 40 cm in length, meaning that a world-record giraffe might just maybe have a couple of cervicals of the same length. But basal titanosauriforms […]
February 7, 2018 at 10:22 am
[…] For a much more recent take on the appearance of the Sauroposeidon vertebrae, see this post. […]