We’re off to Oxford next week for SVPCA, so things may be quiet around here for a few days. Catch you on the flip side.

Sometimes you just can’t make this stuff up. You may recall a story from the Onion Our Dumb Century book, allegedly from 1904, about the skeleton of Satan being discovered in Wyoming.

I’ve been thinking about Barosaurus lately. <homer>Mmmm … Barosaurus …</homer> The best (and only, really) good recent treatment of Barosaurus is in John McIntosh’s chapter of the 2005 IUP Thunder Lizards volume.

Last time, we saw why Haplocanthosaurus couldn’t be a juvenile of Apatosaurus or Diplodocus , based on osteology alone.  But there’s more: Ontogenetic status of Haplocanthosaurus Here is where is gets really surreal.  Woodruff and Fowler (2012) blithely assume that Haplocanthosaurus is a juvenile of something, but the type specimen of the type species — H .

The discussion over the new paper by Woodruff and Fowler (2012)–see this post and the unusually energetic comment thread that follows–made me want to go back to the literature and see what was known or could be inferred about neural spine bifurcation in the Morrison sauropods before the recent paper was published.

Well, this is frustrating.  Over on the VRTPALEO mailing list, all the talk at the moment is of the new paper by Henry Galiano and Raimund Albersdörfer (2010), describing their rather comically named new species Amphicoelias brontodiplodocus .  And to be fair, the material they’re describing is sensational, and the photographs in the paper are pretty good.

I drew a couple of these a while back, and I’m posting them now both to fire discussion and because I’m too lazy to write anything new. Here’s the neck of Apatosaurus , my own reconstruction based on Gilmore (1936), showing the possible paths and dimensions of continuous airways (diverticula) outside the vertebrae.

Introduction Back when the Xenoposeidon paper came out, we suggested that Xeno could be the first repesentative of a new sauropod “family”, and then discussed at some length: what is a “family” anyway?

First off, thanks to everyone for reading, commenting on, and discussing the previous post. Seeing the diversity of opinions expressed has been interesting and gratifying for us, and we’ve learned a lot from you about how the blogosphere is changing science already. My own thoughts follow, Mike chimes in at the end, and Darren will probably have something to add soon, too.

There is almost too much coolness going on right now. Here’s a brief rundown. SV-POW!