As we’ve previously noted more than once here at SV-POW!, apatosaurine cervicals really are the craziest things. For one thing, they are the only dinosaur bones to have inspired the design of a Star Wars spaceship. One result of this very distinctive cervical shape, with the ribs hanging down far below the centra, was that the necks of apatosaurines would have been triangular in cross-section, rather than tubular as often depicted.

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Today is a good day for sauropod science. Since we’re not getting this up until the afternoon, you’ve probably already seen that Emanuel Tschopp and colleagues have published a monstrous specimen-level phylogenetic analysis of Diplodocidae and, among other things, resurrected Brontosaurus as a valid genus.

According to Rare Historical Photos from the 1860s to the 1960s, this is the iceberg that sank the Titanic: {.size-full .wp-image-11501 aria-describedby=“caption-attachment-11501” loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“11501” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2015/02/13/the-titanic-was-sunk-by-an-apatosaurus-cervical/rare-historical-photos-16/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/rare-historical-photos-16.jpg” orig-size=“1308,740”

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A while back, Ben Miller reminded me that when I posted about the old Yale “ Brontosaurus ” skull, I promised: So how did the YPM come to make such a monstrosity? What was it based on? Tune in next time for the surprising details! I told him at the time that I’d soon get around to writing a post. But before I did, he wrote a post on this himself: Bully for Camarasaurus . And it’s excellent.

Last night, I submitted a paper for publication — for the first time since April 2013. I’d almost forgotten what it felt like.

Actually we had the Jurassic talks today, but I can’t show you any of the slides*, so instead you’re getting some brief, sauropod-centric highlighs from the museum. * I had originally written that the technical content of the talks is embargoed, but that’s not true–as ReBecca Hunt-Foster pointed out in a comment, the conference guidebook with all of the abstracts is freely available online here.