Here’s a skeletal reconstruction of Alamosaurus modified from Lehman and Coulson (2002:fig. 11). I cloned the neck and rotated it a few degrees to see where it would put the head. The skeleton in the figure is scaled to the size of the individuals in the Smithsonian and at UT Austin.

We really should have covered this ages ago …  Here we are, blithering on about brachiosaurids and diplodocoids and all, and we’ve never really spelled out what these terms mean.  Sorry! The family tree of a group of animals (or plants, or fungi, or what have you) is called its phylogeny.  The science of figuring out a phylogeny is called systematics.

Here’s the answer to last week’s riddle. The big vertebra was obviously cervical 8 of Sauroposeidon , which you’ve seen here more than once. The small vertebra is also a mid-cervical, also from the Early Cretaceous, but from Croatia rather than Oklahoma. The very long centrum, unbifurcated neural spine, and extensive pneumatic sculpturing mark it as a brachiosaurid.

By now you’ll recognize this as NHM 46870, a minor celebrity in the world of pneumatic sauropod vertebrae. Darren has covered the history of the specimen before, and in the last post he showed photographs of both this chunk and its other half. He also briefly discussed the Air Space Proportion (ASP) of the specimen, and I’ll expand on that now.

It’s no secret – at least, not if you’re a regular SV-POW!

This is corn on the cob: This is a shish kebab: Most tetrapods are like shish kebabs: a whole lot of meat stuck on a proportionally tiny skeleton.

Sorry to keep dumping all these off-topic thoughts on you all, but I got an email from Matt today in which he suggested that there should be some system of giving people credit for particularly insightful blog comments.  (This came up for the obvious reason that SV-POW! readers tend to leave unusually brilliant comments, as well as having excellent reading taste and being remarkably good looking.)

First off, thanks to everyone for reading, commenting on, and discussing the previous post. Seeing the diversity of opinions expressed has been interesting and gratifying for us, and we’ve learned a lot from you about how the blogosphere is changing science already. My own thoughts follow, Mike chimes in at the end, and Darren will probably have something to add soon, too.

Here at SV-POW! Towers, we often like to play Spot The T. rex — a simple drinking game that can be played whenever you have supply of palaeontology-related news reports.  Each player in turn takes a report off the stack, and if T. rex is mentioned anywhere in the report, the player drinks.

Because the appearance of accuracy has an irresistible allure, non-specialists frequently treat these estimates as factual.