There’s recently been a rash of requests for PDFs on the VRTPALEO mailing list.  Or maybe “plague” would be a better word.

Well, this is frustrating.  Over on the VRTPALEO mailing list, all the talk at the moment is of the new paper by Henry Galiano and Raimund Albersdörfer (2010), describing their rather comically named new species Amphicoelias brontodiplodocus .  And to be fair, the material they’re describing is sensational, and the photographs in the paper are pretty good.

I drew a couple of these a while back, and I’m posting them now both to fire discussion and because I’m too lazy to write anything new. Here’s the neck of Apatosaurus , my own reconstruction based on Gilmore (1936), showing the possible paths and dimensions of continuous airways (diverticula) outside the vertebrae.

Let’s assume for a moment that you accept our contention (Taylor et al. 2009) that, since extant terrestrial tetrapods habitually hold their necks in maximal extension, sauropods did the same.  That still leaves the question of why we have the neck of our Diplodocus reconstruction at a steep 45-degree angle rather than the very gentle elevation that Stevens and Parrish’s (1999) DinoMorph project permits.

So far in our coverage of the new paper (Taylor et al. 2009) we’ve mostly focused on necks, following the discovery by Graf, Vidal, and others that when they are alert and unrestrained, extant tetrapods hold their necks extended and their heads flexed. (Although they turn up with distressing regularity, “ventroflexed” is redundant and “dorsiflexed” is an oxymoron; Darren lays down the law here.) There’s more to the paper;

Welcome, one and all, to Taylor, Wedel and Naish (2009), Head and neck posture in sauropod dinosaurs inferred from extant animals .  It’s the first published paper by the SV-POW! team working as a team, published in Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, and freely available for download here.

Here are the first two cervical vertebrae of the Carnegie Apatosaurus , from Gilmore’s 1936 monograph. As you can see, they are fused together. It is a bit weird that we haven’t covered the morphology of the atlas-axis complex here before. And sadly we’re not going to cover it now.

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.

Pursuant to a comment I just made on the previous post, here is cervical 8 of YPM 1980, the holotype of Brontosaurus excelsus , now of course known as Apatosaurus excelsus , in anterior and left lateral views, scanned from plate 12 of Ostrom and McIntosh 1966. Look on my cervicals, ye mighty, and despair. You see? I wasn’t kidding. This thing is beyond crazy.

Those of you who have been paying attention to my recent posts will have pretty much known this was coming.