The real thunder lizard

While the genus Brontosaurus is hung on A. excelsus, Apatosaurus louisae seems to have been the most robust of all the "thunder lizard" apatosaurines.

Originally done (hurriedly) for our Supersaurus paper in the middle of the last decade, I finally got around to updating it for a paper on sauropod neck posture I'm doing (along with a poster at SVP on the same subject).

Edit: When I posted this I concluded with "You can probably expect to see lots of revisions to sauropods in the coming months." Well those revisions have started to roll out, and Apatosaurus is one of the stranger ones. Aside from the thicker neck (which was already in the previous version) and the new pose, the angle of the back has changed. Part of this is from adopting a more contemorary understanding of kind leg kinematics, and the rest stems from my ongoing work on pectoral girdle placement (I presented some of the ramifications at SVP this last year).

Now the tail doesn't so much arc "up" as it makes the tail angle back to horizontal as it exits the pelvis, which allows the big tail retractor muscles to have better mechanical leverage.