As often happens here, a comment thread got to be more interesting than the original post and ended up deserving a post of its own. In this case, I’m talking about the thread following the recent Mamenchisaurus tail club post, which got into some interesting territory regarding mass estimates for the largest sauropods.
Shunosaurus lii is a basal eusauropod from the Middle Jurassic of China. Outside of palaeontological circles, it’s not at all well known — which is kind of surprising, as it’s one of the best represented of all sauropods. It’s known from numerous complete skeletons, including skulls, and has been described in detail in Zhang’s (1988) monograph: 89 pages and 15 plates.
Lovers of fine sauropods will be well aware that, along with the inadequately described Indian titanosaur Bruhathkayosarus , the other of the truly super-giant sauropods is Amphicoelias fragillimus . Known only from a single neural arch of a dorsal vertebra, which was figured and briefly described by Cope (1878) and almost immediately either lost or destroyed, it’s the classic “one that got away”, the animal that sauropod
[Hello to any redditors who have followed a link here. Please scroll down to find the more interesting articles; sorry that your introduction to SV-POW! is a backlink article.] Excuse the self-promotion, but some SV-POW! readers might be interested to know that I have an Ask Me Anything going over at the social news aggregator site reddit com.
The last time we talked about Alamosaurus, I promised to explain what the arrow in the above image is all about. The image above is a section through the cotyle (the bony socket of a ball-and-socket joint) at the end of one of the presacral vertebra.
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.
Get on over to Art Evolved and scope out the sauroponderous Sauropod Gallery. It’s brobdingnaginormous. I don’t want to seem biased, but there’s a lot of hot brachiosaurian action on display.
After a completely barren 2008, this year is turning out to be a good one for me in terms of publications. Today sees the publication of Taylor (2009b), entitled Electronic publication of nomenclatural acts is inevitable, and will be accepted by the taxonomic community with or without the endorsement of the code — one of those papers where, if you’ve read the title, you can skip the rest of the paper.
Just checking: no-one’s bored of brachiosaurs yet, are they? Thought not. Right, then, here we go! Greg Paul’s (1988) study of the two “ Brachiosaurus ” species — the paper that proposed the subgenus Giraffatitan for the African species — noted that the trunk is proportionally longer in Brachiosaurus than in Giraffatitan due to the greater length of its dorsal centra.
