Apatosaurus louisae from below
May 3, 2022
We’ve shown you the Apatosaurus louisae holotype mounted skeleton CM 3018 several times: shot from the hip, posing with another massive vertebrate, photographed from above, and more. Today we bring you a world first: Apatosaurus from below. Scroll and enjoy!
Obviously there’s a lot of perspective distortion here. You have to imagine yourself lying underneath the skeleton and looking up — as I was, when I took the short video that was converted into this image.
Many thanks to special-effects wizard Jarrod Davis for stitching the video into the glorious image you see here.
The most obvious effect of the perspective distortion is that the neck and tail both look tiny: we are effectively looking along them, the neck in posteroventral view and the tail in anteroventral. The ribs are also flared in this perspective, making Apato look even broader than it is in real life. Which is pretty broad. One odd effect of this is that this makes the scapulae look as though they are sitting on top of the ribcage rather than appressed to its sides.
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 
May 3, 2022 at 8:53 am
:D
May 3, 2022 at 9:58 am
Wow, Heinrich, that post is gold! I don’t know how I managed to miss it, but I’m glad you’ve brought it up now!
May 3, 2022 at 12:57 pm
Since you so nearly got stepped on, some perspective distortion can be forgiven.
Which reminds me of a friend who’s nonprofit is reptile rescue – every time he posts pics of repaired carapaces of turtles that have been stepped on by horses, run over by cars, and cut up by lawn mowers – the idea of a small animal surviving those events at all amazes me. Kinda surprised they only occupy the turtle niche now that I think about it, but I guess there is a correspondingly massive energy hit for growing and carrying armor like that.
May 10, 2022 at 6:20 am
Very interesting! Probably no one including Greg Paul has done skeletal restorations in this perspective as well?
I think it should be possible to reduce distortion by taking a panoramic view like that in iPhone by running it slowly on a rail beneath the skeleton?
Otherwise BBC’s Walking with Dinosaurs had done something similar in animation (view under the belly of the rumbling Diplodocus), though only in “flesh”.