Re: Gallery and Commentary for Copenhagen Mamenchisaurus

[Mike Taylor <mike@indexdata.com>]

> Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2004 06:33:14 -0700 (PDT)
> From: "T. Michael Keesey" <mightyodinn@yahoo.com>
>
> > So the basic problem of sauropod neck posture is that the
> > morphology seems to tell us one thing, whereas energetic and
> > evolutionary considerations tell us another.  If you can resolve
> > this contradiction, you will make me a happy man.
> 
> As Scott Hartman pointed out (pers. comm.), the problem goes away if
> you allow the animal to rear up on its hind legs. The axis might be
> at the sacrum, not the base of the neck.

Except that rearing in sauropods has yet to be demonstrated or even
modeled.  There is a classic Matt Bonnan post on that subject -- let's
see if I can find it [rustle, rustle].  Ah yes, here it is:
        http://www.cmnh.org/dinoarch/2000Jul/msg00256.html
and there's more at
        http://www.cmnh.org/dinoarch/1999May/msg00003.html
which quotes a long message from Matt, though oddly I can't find the
original.

What's more, I am told that at two different conferences (an SVP in
the USA and an SVPCA in the UK), Stevens presented unpublished results
in which the DinoMorph software seems also to show a horizontal
neutral posture for _Brachiosaurus_.  I bet you my firstborn that _B._
didn't rear to feed (whatever Steven Spielberg says).

Inexplicably, the _Brachiosaurus_ result -- and other DinoMorph
results, such as those obtained for extant critters such as giraffes
-- are still not published, so there's not much more we can say about
them yet.  I know that more DinoMorph-related papers are in press, so
I guess they include these results.  Fingers crossed.

So I don't think rearing is at all a good one-size-fits-all solution
to the Fundamental Sauropod Posture Problem.

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