On the off chance that the postparapophyses of Shunosaurus weren’t enough to sate your appetite for Sino-pod rib-related weirdness, here are a couple of fused cervicals of Klamelisaurus , from the Middle Jurassic of China (from Zhao 1993:plate 1). These are weird for a couple of reasons.

The hot news on the block right now is the description of the new sauropod Abydosaurus mcintoshi , which, amazingly, is known from four more or less complete skulls (Chure et al. 2010).  This is unheard of — absolutely unprecedented.  There are few enough sauropods for which a skull is known at all; but four of them, all in decent nick, is breathtaking.

Since I started taking photographs of sauropod vertebrae back in 2004, I’ve got much, much better at it, and for the last few months I’ve been meaning to write an article about what I’ve learned along the way.

Here’s one of those text-light photo posts that we always aspire to but almost never achieve. In the spring of 2008 I flew to Utah to do some filming for the History Channel series “Evolve”, in particular the episode on size, which aired later that year. I always intended to post some pix from that trip once the show was done and out, and I’m just now getting around to it…a bit belatedly.

I hope you have a pair of 3D glasses.  If you do, then check this baby out: Brachiosauridae incertae sedis NHM R5937, "The Archbishop", damaged cervical vertebra S in right posterolateral view; red-cyan 3D anaglyph. This image and others of the same specimen copyright the NHM since it's their specimen.

In my not-long-quite-so-recent-any-more paper on Brachiosaurus and Giraffatitan , I gave as one of the autapomorphies of Brachiosaurus proper that the glenoid articular surface of its coracoid is laterally deflected.  Although we’ve discussed this a little in comments on SV-POW!, it’s not yet made it into one of our actual articles.

Ever since we started working on Sauroposeidon , Rich Cifelli and I dreamed of seeing the reconstructed neck on display. That vision has come to fruition. The Oklahoma Museum of Natural History opened a totally new building in 2000. Coincidentally, the opening ceremony for the new digs was held the same week that the paper naming Sauroposeidon came out in JVP.

Broadly speaking, pneumatic sauropod vertebrae come in two flavors. In more primitive, camerate vertebrae, modeled here by Haplocanthosaurus , the centrum is a round-ended I-beam and the neural arch is composed of intersecting flat plates of bone called laminae ( lam above; fos = fossa, nc = neural canal, ncs = neurocentral suture;

Trying two new things this morning: grilling a turkey, and live-blogging on SV-POW! I like to grill. Steak, chicken, kebabs, yams, pineapple, bananas–as long as it’s an edible solid, I’m up for it. But I’ve never grilled a turkey before. Neighbor, colleague, fellow paleontologist and grillmeister Brian Kraatz sent me his recipe, which is also posted on Facebook for the edification of the masses.

I drew a couple of these a while back, and I’m posting them now both to fire discussion and because I’m too lazy to write anything new. Here’s the neck of Apatosaurus , my own reconstruction based on Gilmore (1936), showing the possible paths and dimensions of continuous airways (diverticula) outside the vertebrae.