An important paper is out today: Carpenter (2018) names Maraapunisaurus , a new genus to contain the species “ Amphicoelias ” fragillimus , on the basis that it’s actually a rebbachisaurid rather than being closely related to the type species Amphicoelias altus . {.size-full .wp-image-15433 aria-describedby=“caption-attachment-15433” loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“15433”

Right on the heels of Aquilops last week, my paper with John Foster on the new specimen of Haplocanthosaurus from Snowmass, Colorado, was just published in Volumina Jurassica.

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.

From Jensen (1987, page 604): “In 1985 I found the proximal third of an extremely large sauropod femur (Figs. 8A, 12A) in a uranium miner’s front yard in southern Utah.  The head of this femur is 1.67 m (5’6″) in circumference and was collected from the Recapture Creek Member of the the Morrison Formation in Utah near the Arizona border.

In our PeerJ neck-anatomy paper, we speculated on how long individual cervical vertebrae might have grown. Here is the relevant section: Now this speculation is shot through with uncertainty. As we’ve discussed before, at length, all estimates of Amphicoelias fragillimus length and mass are wildly speculative; and Parrish’s allometry result was extrapolated from an unconvincingly small data set.

I have a new paper out: Wedel, M.J. 2012. A monument of inefficiency: the presumed course of the recurrent laryngeal nerve in sauropod dinosaurs. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 57(2):251-256.

Lovers of fine sauropods will be well aware that, along with the inadequately described Indian titanosaur Bruhathkayosarus , the other of the truly super-giant sauropods is Amphicoelias fragillimus .  Known only from a single neural arch of a dorsal vertebra, which was figured and briefly described by Cope (1878) and almost immediately either lost or destroyed, it’s the classic “one that got away”, the animal that sauropod

First, some horn-tooting. A few years ago I realized that I good lateral-view photos of lots of big stuff–a blue whale skeleton, a Brachiosaurus skeleton, a big bull elephant, myself–and I put together a composite picture that showed everything together and correctly scaled. Various iterations of the project, which I undertook solely for my own amusement, are here, here, and here.