Do you want to know how stupid my co-blogger Matt Wedel is?  Having already discussed the ostrich Struthio camelus in Wedel et al. (2000b), that total idiot went on to misspell the trivial name as “ camellus ” in Wedel and Cifelli (2005:52).  What a doofus. And do you want to know how dumb my other co-blogger Darren Naish is?

OMG! WTF? Was I asleep? Had I slept? Did I miss something? Does paleontological training destroy the part of the brain that knows how to use a freakin’ tape measure? Are paleontologists incapable of imagining that others might want to make meaningful comparisons with their taxa?

I made this, just for the heck of it. The critters are, from left to right: OMNH 53062, the holotype of Sauroposeidon proteles , with a reconstructed skeleton grayed in; HM XV2, a fibula of Brachiosaurus brancai , which represents the largest known individual of Brachiosaurus ; HM SII, the nearly complete mounted composite skeleton of Brachiosaurus brancai in Berlin; a 20-foot-tall, world record giraffe;

I ended the last post with this teaser: There is another sauropod (sort of) in Episode IV (sort of), but I’ll wait a week before I blab about that one. I wonder if anyone will guess what it is in the meantime? The mystery lasted all of a single comment.

A 3D reconstruction of the paranasal sinuses in a human (from Koppe et al. 1999). You also have paratympanic sinuses that pneumatize the mastoid process of the temporal bone (feel for an inferiorly-directed, thumb-size protuberance right behind each ear). An x-ray of a pig skull, from here. Can you see the outline of the brain-shaped endocranial cavity? How about in this x-ray of a rhino skull? Image courtesy of Kent Sanders.

Brachiosaurus: uglier than you think (we’re sorry, but it’s true). UPDATE: Fig. 1 from Witmer (2001) showing hypothesized position of the fleshy nostrils in Brachiosaurus. How awesome was our trip to Germany?

We warned you that the Awesome was coming … now it’s here.  The first installment of Awesome, anyway, and there’s plenty more to come. Matt and I have just returned from a nine-day trip to Germany that was pretty much Heaven-on-Earth for us.  The first three days were spent in Bonn, at the first open workshop of the DFG-funded Biology of the sauropod dinosaurs: the evolution of gigantism project.

If you’re new to this thread, here’s a minimal reading list, in chronological order. I say ‘minimal’ because all of the relevant papers are freely available, and therefore all of the factual claims are easy to check.

You know, we have not done what we intended with this blog. We intended to post pretty pictures of sauropod vertebrae, sketch a few lines of text a la our inspiration, and call it good. But not one of us is capable of shutting up –me least of all–so we sit down to write 6 lines and end up writing 60 or 600. Well, not this time.

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.