Apatosaurus louisae from below

We’ve shown you the Apatosaurus louisae holotype mounted skeleton CM 3018 several times: shot from the hip, posing with another massive vertebrate, photographed from above, and more. Today we bring you a world first: Apatosaurus from below. Scroll and enjoy!

Obviously there’s a lot of perspective distortion here. You have to imagine yourself lying underneath the skeleton and looking up — as I was, when I took the short video that was converted into this image.

Many thanks to special-effects wizard Jarrod Davis for stitching the video into the glorious image you see here.

The most obvious effect of the perspective distortion is that the neck and tail both look tiny: we are effectively looking along them, the neck in posteroventral view and the tail in anteroventral. The ribs are also flared in this perspective, making Apato look even broader than it is in real life. Which is pretty broad. One odd effect of this is that this makes the scapulae look as though they are sitting on top of the ribcage rather than appressed to its sides.