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If I could dissect a sauropod
Luke Horton asked in a comment on a recent post: Given the chance to examine a titanosaur cadaver with your hypothetical army of anatomists, what would you look for first? *FACEPALM* How we’v…
To get back to Luke’s question, there are loads of interesting things that could be dissected in a sauropod, but since the remit here is Matt Wedel x titanosaur, there’s only one possible answer: the lung/air sac system and its diverticula. Specific weird things to note: neck about twice as long as tail, cervical vertebrae about twice as tall as dorsals, and smallish pelvic bones relative to hindlimbs (= skinny posterior abdomen, at least dorsoventrally). ), Barosaurus being the most diplodocid-y and least titanosaur-y neosauropod I know of, and BYU 9024 being from a hellaciously big individual no matter what its classification; the Snowmass Haplocanthosaurus, because I have just so many questions about all the weird stuff going on with its tail (see Wedel et al. 2021 and this post for starters); Omeisaurus or Xinjiangtitan, to represent a maximally derived-but-also-weird non-neosauropod; Sauroposeidon, for obvious emotional reasons(but not enough to dethrone the others).
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