What a cervical vertebra of an 800m sauropod would look like

Gilmore (1936:243) says of the mounted skeleton of Apatosaurus louisae CM 3018 in the Carnegie Museum that “with the skull in position the specimen has a total length between perpendiculars of about 71 feet and six inches. If the missing eighteen terminal caudal vertebrae were added to the tip of the tail, in order to make it conform to known evidence, the skeleton will reach an estimated length of 76 feet, 6 inches.” That’s 23.3 meters.

But what if it was 800 meters long instead? That would be 34.3 times as big in linear dimension (and so would mass 34.3^3 = 40387 time as much, perhaps a million tonnes — but that’s not my point).

What would a cervical vertebra of an 800m sauropod look like?

Gilmore (1936:196) gives the centrum length of CM 3018’s C10 as 530 mm. In our 34.3 times as long Apatosaurus, it would be 18.17 meters long. So here is what that would look like compared with two London Routemaster buses (each 8.38 meters long).

Cervical vertebra 10 of a hypothetical 800 meter long Apatosaurus louisae, with London Routemaster buses for scale. Vertebra image from Gilmore 1936:plate XXIV; bus image by Graham Todman, from Illustrations for t-shirts.

What is the research significance of this? None at all, of course. Still I think further study is warranted. Some look at sauropods that once were, and ask “why?”; but I go further; I look at sauropods that never were, and ask “why not?”