Today, we were at the BYU Museum of Paleontology, which is in a ridiculously scenic setting with snow-capped mountains on the horizon in almost every direction.

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A while back, we noted that seriously, Apatosaurus is just nuts, as proven by the illustrations in Ostrom and McIntosh (1966: plate 12). Now I’m posting those illustrations again, in a modified form, to make the same point.

The longest cell in Andy Farke is one of the primary afferent (sensory) neurons responsible for sensing vibration or fine touch, which runs from the tip of his big toe to his brainstem.

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According to Rare Historical Photos from the 1860s to the 1960s, this is the iceberg that sank the Titanic: {.size-full .wp-image-11501 aria-describedby=“caption-attachment-11501” loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“11501” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2015/02/13/the-titanic-was-sunk-by-an-apatosaurus-cervical/rare-historical-photos-16/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/rare-historical-photos-16.jpg” orig-size=“1308,740”

This arrived on my Facebook wall, courtesy of Raul Diaz. For a split second I really did think the one second from the right was an older-model Carnegie Brachiosaurus toy. I assume that, like me, you have people in your life that you don’t correspond with very often, and when you remember that they exist, it just makes you happy.

I have often argued that given their long hindlimbs, massive tail-bases, and posteriorly-located centers of mass, diplodocids were basically bipeds whose forelimbs happened to reach the ground. I decided to see what that might look like. Okay, now obviously I know that there are no trackways showing sauropods actually getting around like this. It’s just a thought experiment.

Christine Argot of the MNHN, Paris, drew our attention to this wonderful old photo (from here, original caption reproduced below): © Paleontological Museum, MoscowIn the beginning of XX century, the Severo-Dvinskaya gallery (named after prof. Amalitsky) became the gold basis of the exhibition hall of ancient life in the Geological Museum of St-Petersburg.