{.alignnone .wp-image-13035 .size-large loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“13035” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2016/03/14/sv-pow-on-the-road-matts-public-lecture-at-the-oklahoma-museum-of-natural-history/wedel-2016-omnh-lecture-flyer/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/wedel-2016-omnh-lecture-flyer.jpg” orig-size=“1372,1775” comments-opened=“1”

I’ve been taking a long-overdue look at some of the recently-described giant sauropods from China, trying to sort out just how big they were. Not a new pursuit for me, just one I hadn’t been back to in a while. Also, I’m not trying to debunk anything about this animal – as far as I know, there was no bunk to begin with – I’m just trying to get a handle on how big it might have been, for my own obscure purposes.

Right on the heels of Aquilops last week, my paper with John Foster on the new specimen of Haplocanthosaurus from Snowmass, Colorado, was just published in Volumina Jurassica.

Somewhat lamely, this is the only slide I had in about lighting. I left it up while I talked about the most important points, which are: Don’t use a flash unless you absolutely have to. If you can swing it, the common convention is to have specimens illuminated from the upper left.* If you have the time, it’s not a bad idea to bracket your Goldilocks shot with brighter and darker photos, by fiddling with your camera settings.

No time for anything new, so here’s a post built from parts of other, older posts. The fourth sacral centrum of Haplocanthosaurus CM 879, in left and right lateral view. This is part of the original color version of Wedel (2009: figure 8), from this page. (Yes, I know I need to get around to posting the full-color versions of those figures. It’s on my To Do list.) Note the big invasive fossa on the right side of the centrum.

In a comment on the previous post, Steve P. asked whether “ Apatosaurus ” minimus might not be a Apatosaurus specimen after all — particularly, an Apatosaurus ajax individual resembling NSMT-PV 20375, the one in the National Science Museum, Tokyo, that Upchurch et al. (2005) so lavishly monographed.

Thanks to the wonder of Osborn and Mook (1921), we have already seen multiview illustrations of the pubis and ischium of Camarasaurus . Now we bring you their Camarasaurus sacrum. This is the sacrum of Camarasaurus supremus AMNH 5761. Top row: dorsal view, with anterior to left. Middle row, from left to right: anterior, left lateral and posterior views. Bottom row: ventral view, with anterior to left.

I mentioned a few posts ago that Matt and I are working on a redescription of AMNH 675, a sauropod specimen referred by Mook (1917) to “ Apatosaurus ” minimus , but which everyone knows is not Apatosaurus . We plan to share the illustrations from this in-progress paper as we prepare them, so here is perhaps the key one: Sacrum and fused ilia of AMNH 675, “Apatosaurus” minimus. Top row: left lateral and right lateral;

In my 2009 brachiosaur paper, I gave rather short shrift to the sacrum of Brachiosaurus — in part because there is no really good sacrum of Giraffatitan to compare it to. Also my own photos of the sacrum, taken back before I figured out how to photograph big bones, are all pretty terrible. Happily, Phil Mannion took some much better photos and gave us permission to use them.

OMG! WTF? Was I asleep? Had I slept? Did I miss something? Does paleontological training destroy the part of the brain that knows how to use a freakin’ tape measure? Are paleontologists incapable of imagining that others might want to make meaningful comparisons with their taxa?