We should have done this long ago.  Back in the early tutorials, we covered skeletal details such as regions of the vertebral column, basic vertebral anatomy, pneumaticity and laminae, but we never started out with an overview of the sauropod skeleton. Time to fix that.  This is numbered as Tutorial 15 but you can think of it as Tutorial Zero if you prefer.

Most people think of Janensch’s (1950b) plate VIII as being the first skeletal reconstruction of “ Brachiosaurus ” (although Janensch’s species “ Brachiosaurus ” brancai is now referred to the separate genus Giraffatitan ).  And it certainly is a classic: "Brachiosaurus" brancai (i.e. Giraffatitan) classic skeletal reconstruction (Janensch 1950b: plate VIII) But the reconstruction published in 1950 is

Shunosaurus lii is a basal eusauropod from the Middle Jurassic of China.  Outside of palaeontological circles, it’s not at all well known — which is kind of surprising, as it’s one of the best represented of all sauropods.  It’s known from numerous complete skeletons, including skulls, and has been described in detail in Zhang’s (1988) monograph: 89 pages and 15 plates.

I’m following up immediately on my last post because I am having so much fun with my wallaby carcass.  As you’ll recall, I was lucky enough to score a subadult male wallaby from a local farm park.  Today, we’re going to look at its feet. Wallabies are macropods;

I am not usually one for field photographs — I am not a geologist, and one bit of rock looks the same as any other to me.  I suffer from a debilitating condition that renders me unable to see fossils in the ground, and am reliant on other people to dig ’em out, clean ’em up and reposit them before I’m able to make ’em into science.

Here’s a skeletal reconstruction of Alamosaurus modified from Lehman and Coulson (2002:fig. 11). I cloned the neck and rotated it a few degrees to see where it would put the head. The skeleton in the figure is scaled to the size of the individuals in the Smithsonian and at UT Austin.

Back in 1999 or 2000 Jaime Headden sent me his skeletal reconstruction of what was then known as Titanosaurus colberti (Jain and Bandyopadhyay 1997), but which has recently been renamed Isisaurus colberti by Upchurch and Wilson (2004). Jaime’s skeletal reconstruction and life restoration are here. Somebody threw a skin over the recon to produce this life restoration.