Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

If you’ve been around SV-POW! for long, you’ve seen me in this shirt:

“Retro Brontosaurus Dinosaur T-shirt” by Dinosaur Tees, modeled by Matt Wedel, cast right forelimb of Brachiosaurus for scale.

I found it on Amazon. Well, actually the first one I found was this rather dapper plesiosaur:

One of the things I like best about the recent movies in Legendary Pictures’ MonsterVerse — Godzilla (2014), Kong: Skull Island, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and the upcoming Godzilla vs Kong — is Monarch, the shadowy organization tasked with finding and studying giant monsters. By the time of King of the Monsters, Monarch is basically SHIELD, with bases scattered around the globe and a giant flying carrier-aircraft, the USS Argo.

I prefer the scrappier, always-on-the-verge-of-being-shut-down Monarch from the 1973-set Kong: Skull Island. And, as you’ve probably guessed by now, I was instantly taken with that plesiosaur t-shirt because in my headcanon it was the official garb of Monarch’s Loch Ness division in the 1970s. I had to go with the sauropod version, though, for obvious reasons — maybe Monarch has a Mokele-mbembe division (not so far out since old M-M shows up as a dot on a map in King of the Monsters). 

I have zero stake in Dinosaur Tees, mind. I just dig their retro dinosaur shirts. Find them here.

And as for Monarch — at least in its early incarnation, as a ragtag group of underfunded folks from wildly differing backgrounds that goes to remote places to search for monsters — I flatter myself that I have a not-entirely-different job.