Seriously. Apatosaurus is just nuts.
May 13, 2008
Pursuant to a comment I just made on the previous post, here is cervical 8 of YPM 1980, the holotype of Brontosaurus excelsus, now of course known as Apatosaurus excelsus, in anterior and left lateral views, scanned from plate 12 of Ostrom and McIntosh 1966. Look on my cervicals, ye mighty, and despair.
You see? I wasn’t kidding. This thing is beyond crazy. The dorsoventral height of its parapophyses alone exceeds that of the centrum and neural spine together. What the heck was it doing with that thing? Seriously. It makes no mechanical sense whatsoever. To the best of my knowledge no-one has ever even advanced a hypothesis about those honkin’ great cervical ribs … and I am not about to break that streak.
Just enjoy.
Reference
- Ostrom, John H., and John S. McIntosh. 1966. Marsh’s Dinosaurs. Yale University Press, New Haven and London. 388 pages including 65 absurdly beautiful plates.
May 13, 2008 at 7:36 pm
And here I always thought of Apatosaurus as a sort of milquetoast sauropod.
May 14, 2008 at 11:06 pm
Maybe there was an attachement for extra-strong breathing muscles so the thing could lift its head higher without suffering from the difference in altitude? (We have a heart rate monitor that records altitude and it can tell the difference between stories in our house.) Or for raising the blood pressure do it could raise its head higher? Or for breathing underwater in spite of from depth compression?
May 16, 2008 at 7:18 pm
Well, I’ll advance a hypothesis: Apatosaurs used those cervical ribs to support enormous folds of skin on their necks that allowed them to inflate their throats into gigantic resonance chambers. This allowed the Apatosaurs to produce low frequency noises loud enough to knock large predators off their feet and to signal to others of their own kind many, many, miles away.
In deference to opinions expressed in the comments on the previous post, I will forgo the giant smilie I’d otherwise have used above.
May 20, 2008 at 7:28 pm
[...] sole surviving drawing is legit and correctly scaled, it was just completely nuts (way more so than Apatosaurus; see Darren’s thoughts here and here). The femur may have been anywhere from 3-4.6 meters [...]