In color, this time, with multiple views, thanks to Xing et al. (2009). They also did a finite element analysis of the tail club and concluded that it was a fairly pathetic weapon. Xing et al. closed by supporting the contention of Ye et al. (2001) that the tail club was a sensory organ.

A while back, Matt speculated on the size of the allegedly giant mamenchisaurid Hudiesaurus .  At the time, all he had to go on was Glut’s (2000) reproduction of half of Dong (1997:fig. 3), and a scalebar whose length was given incorrectly.  The comments on that article gave some more measurements, but we never got around to showing you the figures of the vertebra in question, so here it is: Hudiesaurus sinojapanorum IVPP V.

Thanks to all for congrats regarding the baby news. Will this mean a short-term break from blogging? In part, yes, but luckily I’ve had the opportunity lately to prepare quite a lot of stuff in advance, so fear ye not oh fans of SV-POW! and Tet Zoo. And to demonstrate that point: welcome to another article in the ‘sauropods of 2008’ series.

You’d think that in 100+ posts we’d be starting to exhaust the territory, but there are vast swaths of sauropod vertebral morphology that we haven’t even touched. Like fused vertebrae. Sauropods fused their vertebrae all the time. Some of those fusions are age-related, many are pathological, and some are…hard to classify.

When we were planning to start this blog, Matt wrote to Darren and me saying “I am thinking that we should keep the text short and sweet” — an aspiration that we have consistently failed to live up to. Not today! Here is Omeisaurus tianfuensis . Even by sauropod standards, that neck is just plain crazy. Omeisaurus tianfuensis skeletal reconstruction, from He et al. (1988:fig.

Seeing the photograph in the last post of the Mamenchisaurus hochuanensis cast at the Field Museum in Chicago reminded me of a picture I’ve been meaning to post for a while. M.hoch, as I like to call it (we’re on familiar terms) is known primarily from its type specimen CCG V 20401, which was nicely described and figured by Young and Zhao in 1972.

In the last post, an astute commenter asked about Hudiesaurus : “A first dorsal 550 mm–isn’t that in Argentinosaurus territory?” Well, let’s find out. Hudiesaurus sinojapanorum was described by Dong (1997) based on a partial skeleton from the Kalazha Formation in China. The holotype, IVPP V 11120, is an anterior dorsal vertebra.