Historical note: Matt and I were idly going through some of the 276 unfinished draft posts on this blog (don’t judge us!) when we stumbled on this — written on 3 March 2011, but inexplicably not published. Here is is, as written.

Yeah, I get it, I’m fat.

Here’s a picture from the Leicester City Museum from my visit in the spring of 2004. In the foreground is a cast skeleton of the prosauropod Plateosaurus, and in the background is the mounted Cetiosaurus. The only mounted Cetiosaurus, anywhere.

The point of the photo is not me looking goofy, it’s that sauropods have really wacked out derived dorsal vertebrae, relative to practically everything else, but especially relative to prosauropods. In prosauropods, the cervicals look like slightly stretched dorsals, the caudals look like slightly smaller and simpler dorsals, but basically everything looks About The Same. In sauropods it’s sometimes hard to believe that the anterior and posterior dorsals belong to the same animal, they’re so different.

Which is old news, really. If sauropod vertebrae weren’t chock-full of architectural exotica, this blog wouldn’t have a reason to exist. But it’s cool that from so simple a beginning we get endless forms most beautiful (hat tip to Chuck D).

doi:10.59350/2e5f1-6t556