As we noted yesterday, the humerus of the Brachiosaurus altithorax holotype FMNH P25107 is inconveniently embedded in a plaster jacket — but it wasn’t always. That’s very strange. I have an idea about that which I’ll come to later. Anyway, although the humerus is now half in a jacket and fully inside a cabinet, we can see it from all angles thanks to the cast that’s part of the mounted skeleton outside the Field Museum.

In the comments on Matt’s post about the giant new Argentine titanosaur specimens, Ian Corfe wondered why Benson et al. (2014) estimated the circumference of the humerus of Brachiosaurus altithorax instead of just measuring it. (Aside: I can’t find that data in their paper.

Order up! Sauroposeidon is stitched together from orthographic views of the 3D photogrammetric models rendered in MeshLab. Greyed out bits of the vertebrae are actually missing–I used C8 to patch C7, C7 to patch C6, and so on forward. The cervical ribs as reconstructed here were all recovered and they are in collections, but they’re in several jackets and boxes and therefore not easily photographed.

Today (12th February) is the one-year anniversary of the first PeerJ papers! As Matt put it in an email this morning: That’s exactly right.

This beauty is by Bryan Riolo, aka Algoroth on DeviantART, who also let me use his giant space Cthulhu for my Collect Call of Cthulhu over on Echo Station 5-7. Update: and here, belatedly, is a link to the piece on DA, with Bryan’s thoughts on it. I love the sense of scale here, with paralititans striding through the surf, the chiaroscuro, and the sheer amount of stuff going on. It reminds me of William Stout’s murals, and lots

Because “here’s that Brian Engh sketch of a sauropod literally stomping the guts out of a theropod you ordered” was a bit ungainly for a post title.

I thought I’d done a decent job of illustrating MB.R.2180:C5 last time, but Wedel was not satisfied, demanding ventral and right-lateral views as well as the provided right lateral, anterior, posterior and dorsal. All right then: here you go! Here once more, for comparison, is Janensch’s (1950) illustration of the same vertebra:

Janensch’s (1950) paper on the vertebral column of Giraffatitan (which he called Brachiosaurus brancai , wrongly as it turns out) is in many ways a superb piece of work.

Back in 2008, Matt and I were at the Museum Für Naturkunde Berlin. We spent some time down in the collections, where we were particularly pleased to see the much-admir’d C8 of Giraffatitan ‘s paralectotype, MB.R.2181 (previously known as HMN SII). While we were down there, we found a C8 from Plateosaurus , too, so we put that next to the Giraffatitan vertebra and shot them together: I’m just sayin’, is all.

Anyone else see these images and really, REALLY want to go dissect one of these bad boys? From the moment I saw this in the trailer, I was thinking: “WANT!” Click to embiggen, and check out the heavy equipment being used to cart off the soft tissue.