Just to break the stranglehold that titanosauriforms clearly have on SV-POW! (kidding), every now and again we need a diplodocoid or mamenchisaurid.

First, some horn-tooting. A few years ago I realized that I good lateral-view photos of lots of big stuff–a blue whale skeleton, a Brachiosaurus skeleton, a big bull elephant, myself–and I put together a composite picture that showed everything together and correctly scaled. Various iterations of the project, which I undertook solely for my own amusement, are here, here, and here.

Long-time SV-POW! readers will have detected a brachiosaurid bias in our writings, and this is for a good reason: it is because brachiosaurids are best. They just are.

So, you’ll all recall the previous post where we looked at the absurdly broad neck base of the Upper Jurassic macronarian Camarasaurus . This time round we’re playing the same game, but looking up at the neck base of the diplodocoid Diplodocus , and again it is of course the Natural History Museum’s (London) mount of the Carnegie cast of D. carnegii (image © NHM). Note how elongate and narrow the centra are: the

Those of you who have been paying attention to my recent posts will have pretty much known this was coming.

Compared to what you’re used to, this photo is undeniably crappy. But it’s the only one I have to hand of something really quite interesting: the distal ‘whiplash’ part of the diplodocid tail.

I was going to write about mystery cervicals of the Cloverly Formation, but that requires knowing something about juvenile vertebrae and Pleurocoelus , so I decided to write about Pleurocoelus , but that still requires knowing something about juvenile vertebrae. So I’m writing this tutorial to lay the groundwork for more goodness to come.

The famous (infamous?) AMNH Barosaurus , from an angle you may not have seen before. There’s a very subtle problem here–both this skeleton (the “mommy”) and the juvenile hiding behind it (the “baby”) are reconstructed with 17 cervicals, although to the best of anyone’s knowledge, Barosaurus only had 16. Nitpicky? Sure.

My favorite room in the world is the big bone room at BYU’s Earth Science Museum.

[Sorry about the late posting today: I had to leave the house at 7:15 to fly to Copenhagen for Christmas lunch — long story — and I am completing today’s post from my hotel room.] There’s no getting away from it: everyone wants to know how big dinosaurs are. Xenoposeidon is based on a single partial vertebra, so there is no way to be at all sure about the size and shape of the whole animal;