As he noted yesterday, Matt is out this week at the Tate conference, where he’ll be giving a keynote on the misleading patterns of sauropod taphonomy. But why am I not out there with him? We did start making tentative plans for a Wyoming Sauropocalypse centered on the Tate conference, but we couldn’t find a way to make it work for various reasons.

Here’s something I’m going to be yapping about in my keynote talk, “The sauropod heresies: evolutionary ratchets, the taphonomic event horizon, and all the evidence we cannot see”, at the 2024 Tate Geological Museum’s Annual Summer Conference (link): how the fossil record of sauropods is probably wildly at variance with standing populations in life, at least in terms of sizes and maturity of the individuals that got fossilized.

We’ve seen the humerus of the Wealden-supergroup putative titanosaur “ Pelorosaurus ” becklesi . We’ve seen the bones of the forearm, the radius and ulna. That’s it for bony remains: no other bones have been found.

Yesterday, we looked at (mostly) the humerus of the Wealden sauropod “ Pelorosaurus ” becklesii , which you will recall is known from humerus, radius, ulna and a skin impression, and — whatever it might be — is certainly not a species of Pelorosaurus . Now let’s look at the radius and ulna.

It’s an oddity that in eight years of SV-POW!, we’ve never written about one of the best of all the Wealden-formation sauropod specimens: the forelimb and associated skin impression NHMUK R1870 that is known as “ Pelorosaurus ” becklesii . Let’s fix that.

If you’ll forgive me a rather self-indulgent post, the neck-anatomy paper that I and Matt recently had published in PeerJ is important to me for three reasons beyond the usual satisfaction of getting a piece of work out in a good journal. Taylor and Wedel (1023:figure 4). Extent of soft tissue on ostrich and sauropod necks.

A package!  A package has arrived! What can it be? All right !  Let’s get down to business? Now, where did I leave that monitor-lizard neck skeleton?  Ah yes … That’s what I’m talkin’ about. … Stay tuned for exciting news about turkey zygapophyses.

But where? You tell us. All will be revealed shortly.

Why did sauropods have such long necks? It’s the single most obvious and important question about sauropods, so it’s a bit surprising to think that we’ve never really addressed this question directly.

It is a strange fate that we should suffer so much fear and doubt over so small a thing. Such a little thing…. — Prepare yourselves, true believers. Pleurocoelus is coming!