The 14 beautiful cervicals of Kaatedocus
October 7, 2015
Well, I’m a moron again. In the new preprint that I just published, I briefly discussed the six species of sauropod for which complete necks are known — Camarasaurus lentus (but it’s a juvenile), Apatosaurus louisae (but the last three and maybe C5 are badly damaged), Mamenchisaurus hochuanensis (but all the vertebrae are broken and distorted), Shunosaurus lii, Mamenchisaurus youngi and Spinophorosaurus nigerensis.
I did have the wit to say, in the Author Comment:
Although I am submitting this article for formal peer-review at the same time as publishing it as a preprint, I also solicit comments from readers. In particular I am very keen to know if I have missed any complete sauropod necks that have been described in the literature. In the final version of the manuscript, I will acknowledge those who have offered helpful comments.
Happily, several people have taken me up on this (see the comments on the preprint), but one suggestion in particular was a real D’oh! moment for me. Oliver Demuth reminded me about Kaatedocus — a sauropod that we SV-POW!sketeers love so much that it has its own category on our site and we’ve held it up as an example of how to illustrate a sauropod specimen. More than that: we have included several illustrations of its vertebrae in one of our own papers.
Aaanyway … the purpose of this post is just to get all the beautiful Kaatedocus multiview images up in one convenient place. They were freely available as supplementary information to the paper, but now seem to have vanished from the publisher’s web-site. I kept copies, and now present them in the conveniently viewable JPEG format (rather the download-only TIFF format of the originals) and with each image labelled with its position in the column.
Please note, these images are the work of Tschopp and Mateus (2012) — they’re not mine!
Atlas and axis (C1-2)
C3
C4
C5
C6
C7
C8
C9
C10
C11
C12
C13
C14
C15 (and the rest of the skeleton) is missing, which makes this a very nearly, but not quite, complete sauropod neck.
Reference
- Tschopp, Emanuel, and Octávio Mateus. 2012. The skull and neck of a new flagellicaudatan sauropod from the Morrison Formation and its implication for the evolution and ontogeny of diplodocid dinosaurs. Journal of Systematic Palaeontology 11(7):853-888. doi:10.1080/14772019.2012.746589
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 
October 7, 2015 at 10:47 pm
why oh why didn’t you run this by me before submission? ;)
October 7, 2015 at 10:54 pm
In retrospect, I should have waited a week after posting the preprint before submitting the manuscript for peer-review. But, you know, impatience!
No matter: when I submit the revisions, I will take into account comments left on the preprint (and here on SV-POW!) as well as the formal reviews solicited by the handling editor.
October 8, 2015 at 6:36 am
You’re welcome. It really is a beautiful fossil. Luckily I was able to speak directly with Emanuel Tschopp about this specimen only about two weeks ago. I can’t wait to start working on the reconstruction of the whole neck.
October 8, 2015 at 7:15 am
thanks mike! just be aware that the axis is not from the same individual, so also this neck is not complete…
October 9, 2015 at 8:12 am
[…] The Kaatedocus siberi holotype SMA 0004 (thanks to Oliver Demuth for pointing this out) […]
October 9, 2015 at 8:14 am
indeed – waiting between pre-print and submission is a good idea. :) Or posting an SV-POW post first ;)