Mike and Darren and I correspond a LOT. Like people in any long-running friendship, we’ve developed a lot of private shorthand. We also share an inordinate fondness for acronyms. One of our favorites is POOP, Prioritized Ordering Of Projects. As in, “What piece of POOP are you working on now?” or “I’ll get back to you on that as soon as I get this load of POOP in the mail.” There are even subdivisions of POOP.

This one, obviously, is a follow-up to this one. Mark drew the picture, Mike had the idea, Mark gave the go-ahead, and here we are. Cry havoc and let slip the azhdarchids of war! Who’s next? Who wants some? You want a little? Huh?

Welcome to the third and climactic episode in my HMN SII:D8 trilogy. If the unique spinoparapophyseal lamina and total lack of infradiapophyseal laminae featured in the first two episodes were not enough to creep you out, then this ought to do it: the ACPLs of this vertebra have great big holes in them! Unfortunately, my photos of this are terrible.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the Humboldt bone-room … hot on the heels of Part 1: Spinoparapophyseal Laminae!, comes another dose of terror thanks to everyone’s favourite mid-to-posterior brachiosaurid dorsal vertebra, HMN SII:D8. First, here is a pretty picture of the whole vertebra in right lateral view: And here is the same bone in the same view, as figured by Janensch (1950:fig.

Of all the sauropod vertebrae in the world, perhaps the single most intriguing is a dorsal vertebra of the Brachiosaurus brancai type specimen HMN SII. It was designated the 20th presacral (i.e. 7th dorsal) by Janensch (1950), but that was on the assumption that the dorsal column consisted of 11 vertebrae.

First, some horn-tooting. A few years ago I realized that I good lateral-view photos of lots of big stuff–a blue whale skeleton, a Brachiosaurus skeleton, a big bull elephant, myself–and I put together a composite picture that showed everything together and correctly scaled. Various iterations of the project, which I undertook solely for my own amusement, are here, here, and here.

Following on from Your neck is pathetic, I offer you the fifth presacral vertebra of the Brachiosaurus altithorax holotype specimen FMNH P25105, in right lateral view, with a complete human dorsal column for scale.

Now that the Xenoposeidon frenzy is over, we seem to be settling down to about one SV-POW! post per week … which on the face of it is not too unreasonable for a blog with “of the week” in its title.

[Sorry about the late posting today: I had to leave the house at 7:15 to fly to Copenhagen for Christmas lunch — long story — and I am completing today’s post from my hotel room.] There’s no getting away from it: everyone wants to know how big dinosaurs are. Xenoposeidon is based on a single partial vertebra, so there is no way to be at all sure about the size and shape of the whole animal;

For the first time in SV-POW! history, a full week has passed between successive posts — well, at least we didn’t actually fail with the “of the week” part, even if it was a close thing. It’s been a busy week, for reasons that will soon be apparent;