t so simple with sauropods. We all know that the neck of any tetrapod is made up of cervical vertebrae, and that the trunk is made up of dorsal vertebrae (subdivided into thoracic and lumbar vertebrae in the case of mammals). But how do we tell whether a given verebra is a posterior...
Hatcher’s illustrations show this feature, though they don’t make it particularly obvious: here are the last two cervicals and the first dorsal, modified from Hatcher (1903:plate I), with the facet in question highlighted in pink: right lateral view at the top, then anterior, and finally...
A few caveats. Just on this trip I’ve seen and heard some things that make me question the usefulness of postcranial fusions — of the neurocentral joints, sacrum, scapulocoracoid, and cervical ribs — for assessing sauropod ontogeny. I don’t think fusions are completely useless, just hig...
The sacro-lumbar expansion is possibly the most misunderstood thing in sauropod biology. First, there are two separate things that have been referred to as sacro-lumbar expansions. The first is the slight swelling of the spinal cord in that region in almost all vertebrates, including humans, to...
(Curry Rogers et al. 2016, and see implications for the nervous system in Smith et al. 2022), it had a highly pneumatic vertebral column (O’Connor 2006), its body proportions were pretty wacky, and it had other features of interest to me, like expanded neurocentral joints (see Wedel ...