Just sayin’: vs. (From here.) Update The rest of the Umbaran Starfighter Saga: Was the Umbaran Starfighter from Clone Wars inspired by an Apatosaurus vertebra? (Dec. 13, 2012) Heck, yes, the Umbaran Starfighter from Clone Wars was inspired by an Apatosaurus vertebra (Dec. 15, 2012) Umbaran Starfighter update (Jan.

Yesterday, Matt showed you this starship from the Star Wars universe: And asked whether it’s based on a cervical vertebra of Apatosaurus . Absolutely it is. It can’t be just a coincidence.

Update, January 21, 2013: YES, it was! Scroll down for links to the entire saga. Because it’s doing a hell of an impression of one, if not. It’s got the huge cervical rib loops (wings), bifurcated neural spine (top fins), and even a condyle on the front of the centrum (cockpit pod). About all it’s missing are the zygapophyses and the cervical ribs themselves.

A few months ago, Matt and Darren saw a picture someone had done of an Apatosaurus with huge neck-flaps. Since they, they’ve tried to find it again but without success.

Another blast from the past: Like the recent Compsognathus , this is a card from the “Flesh” card-game that was printed across several progs (issues) of the comic 2000 AD in 1977.

We’re off to Oxford next week for SVPCA, so things may be quiet around here for a few days. Catch you on the flip side.

In a comment on the previous post, Steve P. asked whether “ Apatosaurus ” minimus might not be a Apatosaurus specimen after all — particularly, an Apatosaurus ajax individual resembling NSMT-PV 20375, the one in the National Science Museum, Tokyo, that Upchurch et al. (2005) so lavishly monographed.

This is the Brontosaurus that I grew up with: It’s by Kenyon Shannon, found on page 14 of The How And Why Wonder Book of Dinosaurs (Geis 1960). I call it Brontosaurus rather than Apatosaurus because this outdated rendition is forever tied to the outdated name in my mind.

I don’t have time to write about this properly, but a few people have asked me about the new Sellers et al. (2012) paper on measuring the masses of extinct animals — in particular, the Berlin Giraffatitan — by having a CAD program generate minimal complex hulls around various body regions.

In the recent post on OMNH 1670, a dorsal vertebra of a giant Apatosaurus from the Oklahoma panhandle, I half-promised to post the only published figure of this vertebra, from Stovall (1938: fig. 3.3). So here it is: And in the second comment on that post, I promised a sketch from one of my notebooks, showing how much of the vertebra is reconstructed. Here’s a scan of the relevant page from my notebook.