That link in the first slide will take you here, and the rest of the series is here.

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.

Here’s the mounted skeleton of Brachiosaurus altithorax outside the Field Museum in Chicago, based on the holotype FMNH P25107, with missing parts filled in from the mounted Giraffatitan brancai MB.R.2181 at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin. To see it with humans and other animals for scale, go here. And here’s the same thing in silhouette.

Last Sunday I got to hang out with Brian Engh and some of his friends in LA. You may remember Brian from this, this, this, this, and, most notoriously, this. We got to drawing dinosaurs, naturally. Now, for me to try to draw dinosaurs next to Brian is more than a little intimidating. I really felt the need to bring my A-game. So this is what I came up with.

All I want to do in this post is make people aware that there is a difference between these two things, and occasionally that affects those of us who work in natural history. In one of his books or essays, Stephen Jay Gould made the point that in natural history we are usually not dealing with whether phenomena are possible or not, but rather trying to determine their frequency.

Last Tuesday Mike popped up in Gchat to ask me about sauropod neck masses.  We started throwing around some numbers, derived from volumetric estimates and some off-the-cuff guessing.

If you’re just joining us, this post is a follow-up to this one, in which I considered the possible size and identity of the Recapture Creek femur fragment, which “Dinosaur Jim” Jensen (1987: page 604) said was “the largest bone I have ever seen”. True to his word, Brooks Britt at BYU got back to me with measurements of the Recapture Creek femur fragment in practically no time at all: Now, taking plaster off a bone is not going to make it any

From Jensen (1987, page 604): “In 1985 I found the proximal third of an extremely large sauropod femur (Figs. 8A, 12A) in a uranium miner’s front yard in southern Utah.  The head of this femur is 1.67 m (5’6″) in circumference and was collected from the Recapture Creek Member of the the Morrison Formation in Utah near the Arizona border.

Now this is super-freakin’ cool, and I’ve been meaning to blog about it for a while.