WWD: Apatosaurus louisae
Added 2023-04-22 08:36:51 +0000 UTCOkay, so this one did not actually appear in WWD, but it's the only one left over and it's in the same time and place as all the others, so I might as well include it. It featured briefly in The Ballad of Big Al, but was very, very obviously just a slightly modified and retextured Diplodocus model. Which is sort of like modelling a tiger by mashing up a cougar, since their builds are pretty different. Although shorter in length, Apatosaurus was much more heavily built than Diplodocus, probably weighing well over thirty metric tonnes. It is not exaggeration when the special refers to them as fortresses of flesh.
Currently unpublished research finds that apatosaurines had remarkably robust and thickened neck vertebrae that widens at the bottom, giving them a triangular cross-section rather than tubular as with other diplodocids. These and other details noted suggests they may have used their huge necks as weapons to batter one another or predators like thirty ton-plus elephant seals. It's even possible that the vertebrae supported keratinous spikes or knobs for even greater pulverizing (although I didn't include them for this version). If Diplodocus was the greyhound of diplodocoids, Apatosaurus is like the pitbull.
I chose the species A. louisae over the type species A. ajax because the former is known from much more complete remains, although the latter might have reached larger sizes. Otherwise, differences between the two are small, and they lived at about the same time.
