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 was at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County yesterday to do some research in the ornithology collection. After lunch I was working on this pelican skeleton and I thought, “Geez, there is just no way to do this thing justice with still photos.

Get your red/cyan anaglyph glasses on, and feast your eyes: Click through for stupidly high resolution.

In recent photo posts on the mounted Brachiosaurus skeleton and its bones in the ground, I’ve lamented that the Field Museum’s online photo archive is so unhelpful: for example, if it has a search facility, I’ve not been able to find it. But the good news is that there’s a Field Museum Photo Archives tumblr. Its coverage is of course spotty, but it gives us at least some chance of finding useful brachiosaur images.

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.

You know the drill: lotsa pretty pix, not much yap. Our first stop of the day was the Fruita Paleontological Area, which has a fanstastic diversity of Morrison animals, including the mammal Fruitafossor and the tiny ornithopod Fruitadens . Plus it’s a pretty epic landscape, especially with the clouds and broken light we had this morning. I found a bone!

Sauropod guru Jeff Wilson is on Twitter, as of a couple of weeks ago. In one of his earliest tweets, he showed the world this gorgeous photo of a Rebbachisaurus dorsal: Jeff Wilson (left) and Ronan Allain (right), with dorsal vertebra of Rebbachisaurus . Photograph by MNHN photographer, Copyright © Muséum National d’Histoire Natural.

The links in the first slide: GIMP Unsharp mask tutorial Fast and easy color balancing Mike’s post on desaturating the background in specimen photos is here, and previous posts in this series are here.

That link in the first slide will take you here, and the rest of the series is here.

Generally when we present specimen photos in papers, we cut out the backgrounds so that only the bone is visible — as in this photo of dorsal vertebrae A and B of NHM R5937 “The Archbishop”, an as-yet indeterminate Tendaguru brachiosaur, in right lateral view: But for some bones that can be rather misleading: they may be mounted in such a way that part of the bone is obscured by structure.