You’ve probably seen a lot of yapping in the news about a new “world’s largest dinosaur”, with the standard photos of people lying down next to unfeasibly large bones. Here’s my favorite–various versions of it have been making the rounds, but I grabbed this one from Nima’s post on his blog, The Paleo King. The first point I need to make here is that photos like these are attention-grabbing but they don’t really tell you much.

A simple picture post, courtesy of John Hutchinson’s tweets [first, second, third]: John R. Hutchinson ‏@JohnRHutchinson @MikeTaylor Abundant in the Egidio Feruglio museum in Trelew, Argentina– almost all their sauropods are rearing I’ve never seen a rearing titanosaur skeleton before.

As a break from photography posts, here are four pretty big vertebrae that swirl in the same thought-space in my head. All are shown to scale, in right lateral view.

Mark Witton, pterosaur-wrangler, Cthulhu-conjurer, globe-trotting paleo playboy and all-around scientific badass, drew this (and blogged about it): I liked it, but I thought it could use some color, so I hacked a crude version in GIMP and sent it to Mark with a, “Hey, please put this on a t-shirt so I can throw money at you” plea. Lo and behold, he did just that. You can get your own from Mark’s Zazzle store.

As I noted in a comment on the previous post, titanosaurs have stupid cervicals. As evidence, here is as gallery of titanosaur cervicals featured previously on SV-POW!. 1. From Whassup with your segmented lamina, Uberabatitan ribeiroi ?, an anterior cervical of that very animal, from Salgado and Carvalho (2008: fig. 5). As well as the titular segmented lamina, note the ridiculous ventral positioning of the cervical rib.

Next week I’m going to visit the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas, Texas, to see their big Alamosaurus (these photos were kindly provided by Ron Tykoski of the Perot Museum, with permission to post). See that sweet string of cervical vertebrae in front of the mounted skeleton?

Thanks to the kind offices of the folks at the Field Museum, especially Fossil Vertebrates collection manager Bill Simpson, on Wednesday I got to hop the fence and spend some quality time with FMNH PR 2209, the mounted holotype specimen of Rapetosaurus krausei . I took a tape measure with me, to get some dimensions from the mounted skeleton.

This one’s mostly a housekeeping post, to keep you abreast of some notable developments with SV-POW!sketeers and friends. Added April 29 – I’m such a tool, forgot to mention that another awesomely niche-y blog has been unleashed on the paleo-blogosphere: March of the Fossil Penguins, by our friend and sometime sauropod-describer Dan Ksepka.

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.