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Right on the heels of Aquilops last week, my paper with John Foster on the new specimen of Haplocanthosaurus from Snowmass, Colorado, was just published in Volumina Jurassica.
I have often argued that given their long hindlimbs, massive tail-bases, and posteriorly-located centers of mass, diplodocids were basically bipeds whose forelimbs happened to reach the ground. I decided to see what that might look like. Okay, now obviously I know that there are no trackways showing sauropods actually getting around like this. It’s just a thought experiment.
This was inspired by an email Mike sent a couple of days ago: I replied that I was indeed freaked out, and that it had given me an idea for a post, which you are now reading. I didn’t have a Giraffatitan that was sufficiently distortion-free, so I used my old trusty Brachiosaurus . The vertebra you see there next to Mike and next to the neck of Brachiosaurus is BYU 9024, the longest vertebra that has ever been
Check out this beautiful Lego Diplodocus : (Click through for the full image at full size.) I particularly like the little touch of having of bunch of Lego Victorian gentleman scientists clustered around it, though they’re probably a bit too big for the skeleton. This is the work of MolochBaal, and all rights are reserved. You can see five more views of this model in his Flickr gallery.
Now considered a junior synonym of Supersaurus , on very solid grounds. Incidentally, unlike the neural spines of most non-titanosaurian sauropods, the neural spine of this vertebra is not simply a set of intersecting plates of bone. It is hollow and has a central chamber, presumably pneumatic.
I need to be sleeping, not blogging, so here are just the highlights, with no touch-ups and minimal commentary. I don’t know what these real street signs were doing sitting on the ground when I walked to the museum this morning, but it was a good omen for the conference. Home base for this part of the conference. We head to Green River, Utah, on Friday for the Early Cretaceous half. I had never seen this on exhibit.
The rest of the series. References Janensch, Werner. 1950. Die Wirbelsaule von Brachiosaurus brancai . Palaeontographica (Suppl. 7) 3: 27-93. Wedel, M.J., and Sanders, R.K. 2002.
On that last slide, I also talked about two further elaborations: figures that take up the entire page, with the caption on a separate (usually facing) page, and side title figures, which are wider than tall and get turned on their sides to better use the space on the page.
Although it would be nice to think that our site views have octupled in the last day because of Mike’s fine and funny posts about what search terms bring people to SV-POW!, the real reason is that we were blessed by incoming links from both pages of this Cracked.com article.