Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

I was in Oklahoma and Texas last week, seeing Sauroposeidon, Paluxysaurus, Astrophocaudia, and Alamosaurus, at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History, the Shuler Museum of Paleontology at SMU, and the Perot Museum of Nature and Science, respectively. I have a ton of interesting things from that trip that I could blog about, but unfortunately I have no time. Ten days from now, I’m off to Colorado and Utah for the Mid-Mesozoic conference and field trip, and between now and then I need to finish up my bits on three collaborative papers, get my summer anatomy lectures posted for internal peer review here at WesternU, and–oh yeah–actually write my conference talk. Fun times.

BUT after being subjected to the horror of the Yale Brontosaurus skull, I figured you all deserved a little awesome.

So here’s me getting one of 351 photos of the most posterior and largest of the Sauroposeidon jackets (this is not the awesome, BTW, just a stop along the way). This jacket holds what I once inferred to be the back half of C7 and all of C8. Now that Sauroposeidon may be a somphospondyl rather than a brachiosaur, who knows what verts these are–basal somphospondyls have up to 17 cervicals to brachiosaurids’ probable 13 (for a hypothetical view of an even-longer-necked Sauroposeidon, see this probably-prophetic post by Mike). The vertically-mounted skeleton in the background is Cotylorhynchus. Cotylorhynchus got a lot bigger than that–up to maybe 6 meters long and 2 or 3 tons–and was probably the largest land animal that had ever existed back in the Early Permian. Photo by OU grad student Andrew Thomas, whom you’ll be hearing about more here in the future.

I couldn’t crank the model myself on the road, thanks to the pathetic lack of processing power in my 6-year-old laptop (which will be replaced RSN). Andy Farke volunteered to do the photogrammetricizing with Agisoft Photoscan, if only I’d DropBox him the pictures. Here’s a screenshot from MeshLab showing the result:

And my best taken-from-overhead quasi-lateral photograph:

If you’re curious, the meter stick at the top is actually one meter long, it just has the English measurement side showing. The giant caliper at the bottom is also marked off in inches, and it is open to 36.0 inches (it didn’t go to 1 meter, or I would have used that). You can tell that there is some perspective distortion involved here since 36 inches on the caliper is 1380 pixels, whereas the 39.4-inch meter stick is only 1341 pixels. Man, I hate scale bars. But they make good calibration targets.

Incidentally, after playing around with the model in orthographic mode in MeshLab, the distortions in the photos of the vertebrae themselves just scream at me. Finally, finally, I can escape the tyranny of perspective. Compare the ends of the big wooden beam at the top of the jacket to get a feel for how much the two views differ.

Working on Sauroposeidon again after all this time made me seriously nostalgic. I love that beast. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that those vertebrae are the most gorgeous physical objects in the universe. Also, an appropriately huge thank-you to preparator Kyle Davies (of apatosaur-sculpting fame), collections manager Jen Larsen, and Andrew Thomas again for help with wrassling those verts around, and for sharing their thoughts and advice. Thanks also to curators Rich Cifelli and Nick Czaplewski for their hospitality and for the go-ahead to undertake this work, and to Andy Farke for generating the model.

I’ll have a lot more to say about this stuff in the future. I didn’t go to all this work just for giggles. For a long time I’ve had a hankering to do a paper on the detailed anatomy of Sauroposeidon, based on all of the things that I’ve noticed in the last decade that didn’t make it into any of the early papers. And now there’s the proposed synonymy of Paluxysaurus with Sauroposeidon. And “Angloposeidon” needs some attention–Darren and I have been thinking about writing “Angloposeidon II” for years now. And…well, plenty more.

So, loads more to come, but not for the next few weeks. Eventually I’ll be publishing all of this–the photos, the 3D models, the whole works. Stay tuned.

UPDATE a few days later

Man, I am frazzled, because I forgot to include the moral of the story: if I can do this, you can do this. There are good, free photogrammetry programs out there–Peter Falkingham published a  whole paper on free photogrammetry in 2012, and posted a guide to an even better program, VisualSFM, on Academia.edu. Even Agisoft Photoscan is not prohibitively expensive–under $200 for an educational license. MeshLab is free and has hordes of good free tutorials. For the photography itself, you basically just build a virtual dome of photos around an object. If you need more instructions than that, Heinrich has written a whole series of tutorials. It doesn’t take a fancy camera–I used a point-and-shoot for the Sauroposeidon work shown here (a Canon S100 operating at 6 megapixels, if anyone is curious). What are you waiting for?