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Sauroposeidon is stitched together from orthographic views of the 3D photogrammetric models rendered in MeshLab. Greyed out bits of the vertebrae are actually missing–I used C8 to patch C7, C7 to patch C6, and so on forward. The cervical ribs as reconstructed here were all recovered and they are in collections, but they’re in several jackets and boxes and therefore not easily photographed.
The meter bars are both one meter as advertised. The giraffe neck is FMNH 34426 (from this post), which is actually 1.7 meters long, but I scaled it up to 2.4 meters to match that of the tallest known giraffe. I think it’s cool that a world-record giraffe neck is roughly as long as two vertebrae from the middle of the neck of Sauroposeidon.
There are loads of little morphological details in the Sauroposeidon vertebrae that are clearer now than they were in our old photographs, but those will be stories for other posts.
