Othniel Charles Marsh, who was always careful to base all of his hundreds of new taxa on the best, most diagnostic material available (Alert: Sarcasm detected!), named Pleurocoelus nanus based on a handful of junenile sauropod vertebrae centra from the Arundel clays of Maryland (Marsh 1888). Here’s the dorsal.

There seems to be some kind of bell curve associated with sauropods. We get lots of medium-sized ones, but very few babies, mostly disarticulated bits, and very few super-immense ones, which are also mostly disarticulated bits. Puertasaurus is known from two vertebrae. Sauroposeidon is known from 3.5. The holotype of Hudiesaurus is a single vertebra;

Again, another exclusive peek at an interesting specimen: the MIWG.7306 vertebra, aka ‘Angloposeidon’ (Naish et al . 2004). Apologies if, by now, you’re bored of my show-casing of this specimen, but – not only is it the only sauropod vertebra of which I personally have multiple unpublished images – it is also a really nice demonstration of the fact that, even in just a single vertebra, there are multiple interesting, bizarre, and

In a comment on the previous post, Amanda wrote: This might be a stupid question (I don’t really believe that there are no such things as stupid quetions) but do you find that sauropod vertebrae are more highly pneumatic in larger sauropods? This is not only not a dumb question, it is one of most important questions about pneumaticity in sauropods. The answer is complex, but here at SV-POW! we embrace the complexity.

Every once in a while it’s good to remember that no matter how big you end up, everybody starts out small. Jack McIntosh came through the OMNH a few years ago and identified all of our sauropod material. There are babies of both Camarasaurus and Apatosaurus from this quarry.

Here’s a photo that – for several reasons – I find interesting (and I hope you agree). It depicts the neck base and pectoral skeleton of the Camarasaurus mounted in London’s Natural History Museum (and is thus © NHM). I should say to begin with that the specimen is a notorious composite, combining the bits of several different-sized animals (and with some parts duplicated from the same individual). This explains why the more anterior of

Ventral, to be precise. Here are the first few cervicals of Cetiosaurus oxoniensis , from the mounted skeleton in the Leicester City Museum. A more typical lateral view is shown below. Forget about the skull, it’s plastersaurus. We tend to think of vertebrae as cylinders with weird bits hanging off, and in most mammals that’s true. (Incidentally, the next time you eat a t-bone steak, have a look at the bone.

I was going to write about mystery cervicals of the Cloverly Formation, but that requires knowing something about juvenile vertebrae and Pleurocoelus , so I decided to write about Pleurocoelus , but that still requires knowing something about juvenile vertebrae. So I’m writing this tutorial to lay the groundwork for more goodness to come.

Inspired by Mike’s recent post on the interior of Chondrosteosaurus from the Isle of Wight’s Wessex Formation, what could I do but weigh in yet again with one of my most-loved specimens: the beauty that is MIWG.7306 (aka ‘Angloposeidon’), a big brachiosaurid also from the Wessex Formation (Naish et al . 2004). As mentioned previously, it’s perhaps intuitively surprising that one of the most useful things about MIWG.7306 is that

My favorite room in the world is the big bone room at BYU’s Earth Science Museum.