I had a new paper come out today. Unofficial supplementary info here, PDF here. I would have had all this ready to go sooner, but the paper came out sooner than I expected. In fact, I didn’t even know that it had been published until Andy Farke (aka the Open Source Paleontologist) wrote me for a PDF. Turnabout’s fair play, I suppose, because last year I congratulated Stuart Sumida on his Gerobatrachus paper before he knew it was out.

I’ve mentioned my ardent love for the Big Bone Room at BYU before. One of the cool things that you can find there and nowhere else is BYU 9047, the holotype of Cathetosaurus lewisi , referred in 1996 to Camarasaurus . In referring to the beast as Cathetosaurus in the title I’m not casting aspersions on that referral. I’m just wondering.

Considering how much time I’ve spent playing around mounted sauropod skeletons, I cannot believe it never occurred to me to do this: This is the mounted Brachiosaurus skeleton in the United terminal at Chicago O’Hare.

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.

In the spirit of Your neck is pathetic and Your torso is also pretty lame, I note that your sacrum is negligible: We have here the sacrum of the Haplocanthosaurus priscus holotype CM 572, in ventral view with the ilia still in place (so that the slightly hourglass-shaped dark regions you see on either side are the acetabular regions of the ilia, facing downwards). To the right is the sacrum of a good-sized adult male human such as my

I see now that Mike has beaten me to the punch in providing your at-least-weekly dose of sauroponderous vertebrawesome. And a nice job it is. Still, I feel funny about you not getting a new picture (ahem), so I’m posting my late entry anyway. For some reason, despite–or perhaps because of–my ardent devotion to cervicals, I have taken it on myself to push the anatomical boundaries of SV-POW! again.