At the top: our old friend BYU 9024 — the cervical vertebra that’s part of the Supersaurus vivianae holotype. At the bottom, C2 (the longest cervical) of Giraffa camelopardalis angolensis FMNH 34426. The Supersaurus vertebra is 138 cm long. We don’t know which cervical it is, but there’s no reason to think it’s the longest. The giraffe vertebra is 31 cm long.

For a paper that I and Matt are preparing, we needed to measure the centrum length of a bunch of turkey cervicals. That turns out to be harder than you’d think, because of the curious negative curvature of the articular surfaces. Above is a C7 from a turkey: anterior view on the left; dorsal, left lateral and ventral views in the middle row; and posterior on the right.

Last Tuesday Mike popped up in Gchat to ask me about sauropod neck masses.  We started throwing around some numbers, derived from volumetric estimates and some off-the-cuff guessing.

In our PeerJ neck-anatomy paper, we speculated on how long individual cervical vertebrae might have grown. Here is the relevant section: Now this speculation is shot through with uncertainty. As we’ve discussed before, at length, all estimates of Amphicoelias fragillimus length and mass are wildly speculative; and Parrish’s allometry result was extrapolated from an unconvincingly small data set.

Here are cervical vertebrae 2-15 of Diplodocus carnegii in right lateral view, from Hatcher (1901: plate 3). Click to embiggen, and then just gaze in wonder for a while. Wouldn’t that look smashing, printed, framed, and hanging on the wall? I wonder if I will ever stop finding new interesting things to think about in this image.

There’s a lot more Sauroposeidon material these days than there used to be, thanks to the referral by D’Emic and Foreman (2012) of Paluxysaurus and Ostrom’s Cloverly material and the new Cloverly material to my favorite sauropod genus.

The last time we reported on the Apatosaurus cervical-shaped Umbaran Starfight from The Clone Wars , we’d heard from the concept artist Russell G. Chong, who had done the final design on the startfighter, and who told that he wasn’t aware of a sauropod original to the design.

This photograph is of what I consider the closest thing to the Platonic Ideal sauropod vertebra: it’s the eighth cervical of our old friend the Giraffatitan brancai paralectotype MB.R.2181.

A few weeks ago, we were considering the bizarre Umbaran Starfighter from The Clone Wars , and its extraordinary similarity to an Apatosaurus cervical: In a comment, Kyle Hartshorn suggested: Nice detective work. Here’s some of that concept art: I found an email address for Chong, and wrote to him: Russell was on vacation for a while, but wrote back a couple of days ago.

A couple of days ago, a paper by Tschopp and Mateus (2012) described and named a new diplodocine from the Morrison Formation, Kaatedocus siberi , based on a beautifully preserved specimen consisting of a complete skull and the first fourteen cervical vertebrae.