Remember this broken Giraffatitan dorsal vertebra, which Janensch figured in 1950?

The Sauroposeidon stuff is cribbed from this post. For the pros and cons of scale bars in figures, see the comment thread after this post. MYDD is, of course, a thing now. Previous posts in this series. Reference: Wedel, M.J., and Taylor, M.P. 2013. Neural spine bifurcation in sauropod dinosaurs of the Morrison Formation: ontogenetic and phylogenetic implications.

From the collections of the American Museum of Natural History, I give you the sacrum and fused ilia of “ Apatosaurus ” minimus AMNH 675, as correctly identified by Steve P in a comment to the previous post: As Steve P rightly pointed out, AMNH 675 was designated as Brontosaurus sp. by Osborn (1904), and made the type of Apatosaurus minimus by Mook (1917). It’s been known for some time that whatever this is,

A couple of posts back, when Matt was talking about turtle laminae, he included a photo of me in front of the skeleton of the giant turtle Archelon . Also in that photo is the tripod I was using — if you want to call it that — a tripod of altogether startling inadequacy. Here it is again, this time in the collections of the AMNH: (Bonus SV-POW!

Sometimes you just can’t make this stuff up. You may recall a story from the Onion Our Dumb Century book, allegedly from 1904, about the skeleton of Satan being discovered in Wyoming.

…with sauropod bones! Lots of basements have them. Some basements have had them for decades, and other basements have been newly constructed to house them. So you can take advantage of that retro chic while taking your basement into the 21st century! What the heck am I talking about?

I only became aware of the term Academic Spring the other day but I instantly loved it. The OA wars have heated up significantly in the past few weeks, and Academic Spring crystallizes a lot of what is going on. Although we always welcome new readers, and no-one who cares about science can afford to be ignorant about access to scholarly publications, we do sometimes feel that at SV-POW! we are mostly preaching to the converted.

This week the SV-POW!sketeers are off to Bonn, Germany, for the Second International Workshop on Sauropod Biology and Gigantism. All three of us will be there, plus SV-POW! guest blogger Heinrich Mallison, plus Wedel Lab grad student Vanessa Graff, plus about 50 other awesome scientists from around the world. So we’ll have a ton of fun, but we probably won’t get much posted.

Vanessa Graff and I spent yesterday working in the herpetology and ornithology collections at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (LACM). The herpetology collections manager, Neftali Comacho, pointed us to this skull of Alligator mississippiensis . It’s not world’s biggest gator–about which more in a second–but it’s the biggest I’ve seen in person.

When you last saw this rhea neck, I was squeezing a thin, unpleasant fluid out of its esophagus. Previous rhea dissection posts are here and here; you may also be interested in my ratite clearing house post. We did that dissection back in 2006. Since then I finished my dissertation, got a tenure-track job, and moved twice. The rhea neck followed me, living in a succession of freezers until last spring.