In case you’ve missed it, William Miller has been asking some great questions over in the comment thread for “Brachiosaurus: both bigger and smaller than you think“. Here’s his most recent, which is so good that the answer required a post of its own: …in birds, the air sacs are obviously useful for flight, and […]

I made this, just for the heck of it. The critters are, from left to right: OMNH 53062, the holotype of Sauroposeidon proteles , with a reconstructed skeleton grayed in; HM XV2, a fibula of Brachiosaurus brancai , which represents the largest known individual of Brachiosaurus ; HM SII, the nearly complete mounted composite skeleton of Brachiosaurus brancai in Berlin; a 20-foot-tall, world record giraffe;

I had a new paper come out today. Unofficial supplementary info here, PDF here. I would have had all this ready to go sooner, but the paper came out sooner than I expected. In fact, I didn’t even know that it had been published until Andy Farke (aka the Open Source Paleontologist) wrote me for a PDF. Turnabout’s fair play, I suppose, because last year I congratulated Stuart Sumida on his Gerobatrachus paper before he knew it was out.

If you’re new to this thread, here’s a minimal reading list, in chronological order. I say ‘minimal’ because all of the relevant papers are freely available, and therefore all of the factual claims are easy to check.

Internal structure of a cervical vertebra of Sauroposeidon, OMNH 53062. A, parts of two vertebrae from the middle of the neck. The field crew that dug up the bones cut though one of them to divide the specimen into manageable pieces.

Matt is staying here at Taylor Towers for a couple of weeks while his wife spends some quality time with some leprous human remains in Bradford (yes, really). Since both Matt and I are big fans of sushi, I took a stab at making some at home on Sunday night: Fig.

One of the newest sauropods (if not the newest, in terms of publication date) is the Brazilian titanosaur Uberabatitan ribeiroi Salgado & Carvalho, 2008 from the Maastrichtian Marília Formation.

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

In this article I’d like look at something that I’ve just spoken about at a conference: the ‘Dinosaurs – A Historical Perspective’ meeting held in London on May 6th and 7th (my thoughts on the conference can be found here and here). Mike attended too (and, like me, gave a talk), but Matt couldn’t make it. Anyway…

In a comment on the previous post, Amanda wrote: This might be a stupid question (I don’t really believe that there are no such things as stupid quetions) but do you find that sauropod vertebrae are more highly pneumatic in larger sauropods? This is not only not a dumb question, it is one of most important questions about pneumaticity in sauropods. The answer is complex, but here at SV-POW! we embrace the complexity.