In the comments on Matt’s post about the giant new Argentine titanosaur specimens, Ian Corfe wondered why Benson et al. (2014) estimated the circumference of the humerus of Brachiosaurus altithorax instead of just measuring it. (Aside: I can’t find that data in their paper.
My camera had a possibly-fatal accident in the field at the end of the day on Saturday, so I didn’t take any photos on Sunday or Monday. From here on out, you’re either getting my slides, or photos taken by other people. On Sunday we were at the John Wesley Powell River History Museum in Green River, Utah, for the Cretaceous talks.
Actually we had the Jurassic talks today, but I can’t show you any of the slides*, so instead you’re getting some brief, sauropod-centric highlighs from the museum. * I had originally written that the technical content of the talks is embargoed, but that’s not true–as ReBecca Hunt-Foster pointed out in a comment, the conference guidebook with all of the abstracts is freely available online here.
The rest of the series. References Janensch, Werner. 1950. Die Wirbelsaule von Brachiosaurus brancai . Palaeontographica (Suppl. 7) 3: 27-93. Wedel, M.J., and Sanders, R.K. 2002.
Aitor Ederra drew my attention to this painting by Frederik Spindler: It’s briefly discussed in a blog-post on changing norms in palaeo-art.
Although it would be nice to think that our site views have octupled in the last day because of Mike’s fine and funny posts about what search terms bring people to SV-POW!, the real reason is that we were blessed by incoming links from both pages of this Cracked.com article.
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.
The links in the first slide: GIMP Unsharp mask tutorial Fast and easy color balancing Mike’s post on desaturating the background in specimen photos is here, and previous posts in this series are here.
This whole section, including the title, is mostly swiped from Mike’s Tutorial 17. Other posts in this series are here. Papers referenced in these slides: Farke, Andrew A., and Sertich, Joseph J.W. 2013. An abelisauroid theropod dinosaur from the Turonian of Madagascar. PLoS ONE 8(4): e62047. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0062047 [PDF] Taylor, Michael P., Mathew J. Wedel and Richard L. Cifelli. 2011.
Let it never be said that we don’t take good care of our commenters. Heck, we’ll even degrade ourselves by blogging about theropods, if that’s what it takes to keep you all happy. Derp dah durr Today’s post is a response to this comment by Dean, asking for lateral view photos of the skull of Giraffatitan . Mike and I did get to spend some quality time with the T1 skull (a.k.a. “Old Toilet-Face”) when we were in Berlin in 2008.