Fighting apatosaur art #6: the ones that got away
Here’s the last post (at least for now) in the Fighting Apatosaur Art series — and we’re back to Brian Engh, who we started with.
Early in the process of putting together artwork to illustrate our apatosaur neck combat hypothesis, Brian tried out a whole bunch of outlandish concepts. Here are two that he showed us, but which were too speculative to push forward with. First, necks as big, floppy display structures:
As a piece of art, I really like this one: the boldness, the vivid contrasts, the alien quality of the animals. But as a palaeobiological hypothesis, it doesn’t really work: so much of the neck morphology in apatosaurs is to do with absorbing ventral?forces?that soft-tissue display structures down there don’t make a whole lot of sense.
Here’s the other one — which Brian titles “Apatosaur inflato-porcupine fish neck-bag”.
I particularly like the way?the theropod being rolled around on the ground and repeatedly spiked. It’s no more than it deserves.
Does the idea of an inflatable neck make sense? I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there were sauropods that did something like this — plenty of extant animals inflate parts of their body for display purposes, after all — but I don’t think it would have been apatosaurs. Again, the?characteristic features of the neck don’t seem well matched?to this scenario.
Well, that’s all the apatosaur neck-combat art we have. If there’s to be a part 7 in this series, it will be made of artwork that you, dear readers, have contributed. Fire away!
