Late to the party – Apatosaurus cervicals

While I have been banging out a bunch of short posts during my travels to keep the Musings ticking over, I had planned to get some longer posts done once I had the time. One of these was intended to comment on the extreme breadth of the Apatosaurus cervical series and just how broad these bones are, and thus how simply massive the neck must have been.

However, over on SV-POW, Matt Wedel has gone and beaten me to the punch on this exact subject. Inevitably he does it in more detail and with greater knowledge than I could have done, so I suggest you all pop over there to read it, though I can comfort myself in the fact that I have different pictures to Matt, so take a gander at these before you head his way.

Small but beautiful (and tasty)

Over the last few days I’ve given a couple of presentations about my work on the feeding ecology of theropods and in particular their apparent preference for juvenile prey. It seemed appropriate (well to me at least) to post up these photos of the very young Apatosaurus in the Carnegie dinosaur hall. I’m rather assuming it’s a pure sculpture since I’m not aware of any very young material of this genus, though I could have missed it, and foolishly I didn’t check the signs. Anyway, my time in Pittsburgh is drawing to a close, but I have, quite literally, nearly a hundred photos of things I want to post and talk about from my visit (and then there’s the zoo and aviary!) so expect to see a lot more stuff in the coming weeks.

My thanks to Mike Habib and Matt Lamanna for hosting my time here. Cheers guys!