Last night London and I spent the night in the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (LACM), as part of the Camp Dino overnight adventure. So we got lots of time to roam the exhibit halls when they were–very atypically–almost empty.

Another raw photo from the road. The Morrison fossils from the Oklahoma panhandle were dug up and prepped out by  WPA workers in the 1930s, and their preparation toolkit consisted of hammers, chisels, pen-knives, and sandpaper.

Matt took this photo in the basement of the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, back in 2008 when we were there as part of the field-trip associated with the Bonn sauropod conference. Hopefully all you long-time SV-POW! readers will recognise the specific vertebra that I’m in love with.

Friday evening I was in a pub with Mike, Darren, John Conway, and Emma Lawlor. We were killing time waiting for the Pink Giraffe Chinese restaurant down the street to open. I was chatting with John about “All Todays”, his speculative presentation with Cevdet Kosemen (a.k.a. Nemo Ramjet) on how future sentients might reconstruct Holocene animals if they were known only from fossils.

Another recent paper (part 1 is here) with big implications for my line of work: D’Emic and Foreman (2012), “The beginning of the sauropod dinosaur hiatus in North America: insights from the Lower Cretaceous Cloverly Formation of Wyoming.” In it, the authors sink Paluxysaurus into Sauroposeidon and refer a bunch of Cloverly material to Sauroposeidon […]

In the recent post on OMNH 1670, a dorsal vertebra of a giant Apatosaurus from the Oklahoma panhandle, I half-promised to post the only published figure of this vertebra, from Stovall (1938: fig. 3.3). So here it is: And in the second comment on that post, I promised a sketch from one of my notebooks, showing how much of the vertebra is reconstructed. Here’s a scan of the relevant page from my notebook.

Something I’ve always intended to do but never gotten around to is posting on some of the immense Apatosaurus elements from the Oklahoma panhandle. Here’s one of the most impressive, OMNH 1670, an isolated dorsal.

Introduction Last time around, Matt walked through a lot of the detailed cervical morphology of Suuwassea and known diplodocids to show that, contra the suggestion of Woodruff and Fowler (2012), Suuwassea is distinct and can’t be explained away as an ontogenomorph of a previously known genus.

In the previous post in this series I looked at the some of the easily available raw data on neural spine bifurcation in Morrison sauropods. In this post I’ll explain how serial variation–that is, variation along the vertebral column in one individual–is relevant to the inferences made in the new paper by Woodruff and Fowler (2012). But first, a digression, the relevance of which will quickly become clear.

…with sauropod bones! Lots of basements have them. Some basements have had them for decades, and other basements have been newly constructed to house them. So you can take advantage of that retro chic while taking your basement into the 21st century! What the heck am I talking about?