What with all the fuss over Aerostron, it seems that we missed SV-POW!’s first birthday. Yes, it’s been just over a year since the very first post, Hello world!, showed us the Brachiosaurus brancai cervical vertebra HMN SII:C8 that we have seen so many times since in various ways.

Pneumatic dorsal vertebrae of Aerosteon (Sereno et al. 2008:fig 7) Big news this week: Sereno et al. (2008) described a new theropod, aptly named Aerosteon (literally, “air bone”), with pneumaticity out the wazoo: all through the vertebral column, even into the distal tail; in the cervical and dorsal ribs; in the gastralia; in the furcula; and in the ilium. This is huge news, and it’s free to the world at PLoS ONE.

Want to see something scary? I mean really scary? OK, here you go: it’s McIntosh et al. (1996:fig. 31), showing the neural arch and spine of dorsal vertebra 6 of Camarasaurus grandis GMNH-PV 101 in anterior and posterior views: I’m sure I need hardly point it out, but this neural spine has two badgering great holes in it! What the heck?

The remarkable object shown here (the one on the left) is a copy of the famous BYU 9044 bone. I know you’ve all heard the story a million times before: it’s the stuff of late-night parties, and fireside stories-from-grandpa, but it would be wrong not to recount it again.

Considering how much time I’ve spent playing around mounted sauropod skeletons, I cannot believe it never occurred to me to do this: This is the mounted Brachiosaurus skeleton in the United terminal at Chicago O’Hare.

Mike and Darren and I correspond a LOT. Like people in any long-running friendship, we’ve developed a lot of private shorthand. We also share an inordinate fondness for acronyms. One of our favorites is POOP, Prioritized Ordering Of Projects. As in, “What piece of POOP are you working on now?” or “I’ll get back to you on that as soon as I get this load of POOP in the mail.” There are even subdivisions of POOP.

If I say Amargasaurus cazaui , you say ‘long spines on cervical vertebrae’. Yes yes, it’s true that Amargasaurus had weird neck spines (and spines that, judging from their shape, really were spines rather than parts of continuous sail-like structures), but have you ever looked at its dorsals? That’s what we’re doing here: this is a posterior dorsal (from Salgado &

Welcome to the third and climactic episode in my HMN SII:D8 trilogy. If the unique spinoparapophyseal lamina and total lack of infradiapophyseal laminae featured in the first two episodes were not enough to creep you out, then this ought to do it: the ACPLs of this vertebra have great big holes in them! Unfortunately, my photos of this are terrible.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the Humboldt bone-room … hot on the heels of Part 1: Spinoparapophyseal Laminae!, comes another dose of terror thanks to everyone’s favourite mid-to-posterior brachiosaurid dorsal vertebra, HMN SII:D8. First, here is a pretty picture of the whole vertebra in right lateral view: And here is the same bone in the same view, as figured by Janensch (1950:fig.

Of all the sauropod vertebrae in the world, perhaps the single most intriguing is a dorsal vertebra of the Brachiosaurus brancai type specimen HMN SII. It was designated the 20th presacral (i.e. 7th dorsal) by Janensch (1950), but that was on the assumption that the dorsal column consisted of 11 vertebrae.