Broadly speaking, pneumatic sauropod vertebrae come in two flavors. In more primitive, camerate vertebrae, modeled here by Haplocanthosaurus , the centrum is a round-ended I-beam and the neural arch is composed of intersecting flat plates of bone called laminae ( lam above; fos = fossa, nc = neural canal, ncs = neurocentral suture;

Earlier this month Daniela Schwarz-Wings and colleagues published the first finite element analysis (FEA) of sauropod vertebrae (Schwarz-Wings et al. 2009). Above is one of the figures showing some of their results. Following standard convention, stresses are shown on a gradient with cooler colors indicating lower stresses and hotter colors indicating higher stresses.

Just checking: no-one’s bored of brachiosaurs yet, are they? Thought not.  Right, then, here we go! Greg Paul’s (1988) study of the two “ Brachiosaurus ” species — the paper that proposed the subgenus Giraffatitan for the African species — noted that the trunk is proportionally longer in Brachiosaurus than in Giraffatitan due to the greater length of its dorsal centra.

Introduction Back when the Xenoposeidon paper came out, we suggested that Xeno could be the first repesentative of a new sauropod “family”, and then discussed at some length: what is a “family” anyway?

Today sees the publication of the new Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology , and with it my paper on the two best-known brachiosaurs and why they’re not congeneric (Taylor 2009).  This of course is why I have been coyly referring to “Brachiosaurus” brancai in the last few months … I couldn’t bear to make the leap straight to saying Giraffatitan , a name that is going to take me a while to get used to. But before we

These are the days of miracle and wonder, especially for all you right-minded people out there who are lovers of fine brachiosaurs.  I heard yesterday evening about a new paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: You and Li’s (2009, duh) description of a new brachiosaur, the first one known from the Cretaceous of Asia: Qiaowanlong kangxii . Best of all, it’s based primarily on vertebral material: You and Li (2009:fig.

We really should have covered this ages ago …  Here we are, blithering on about brachiosaurids and diplodocoids and all, and we’ve never really spelled out what these terms mean.  Sorry! The family tree of a group of animals (or plants, or fungi, or what have you) is called its phylogeny.  The science of figuring out a phylogeny is called systematics.

In an email, Vladimir Socha drew my attention to the fact that Tom Holtz’s dinosaur encyclopaedia estimates the maximum height of Sauroposeidon as 20 meters plus, and asked whether that was really possible.  Here’s what Tom actually wrote: “ Sauroposeidon was one of the largest of all dinosaurs.

Brachiosaurus and friends from here (hat tip to Ville Sinkkonen). In an e-mail with explicit permission to quote, our colleague Casey Holliday sent the following thoughts about our new paper and the subsequent ten days of related blogging: I don’t know guys. I like your blogs, and your papers are fine.

[I wrote this in the cafe on the ground floor of the BBC’s Millbank studios, where I spent much of yesterday, just before I headed off for Paddington and the train home.  I have lightly edited it since the original composition.] It’s been a day spent doing publicity for the new SV-POW! paper on sauropod neck posture.