As he noted yesterday, Matt is out this week at the Tate conference, where he’ll be giving a keynote on the misleading patterns of sauropod taphonomy. But why am I not out there with him? We did start making tentative plans for a Wyoming Sauropocalypse centered on the Tate conference, but we couldn’t find a way to make it work for various reasons.

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We’ve seen the humerus of the Wealden-supergroup putative titanosaur “ Pelorosaurus ” becklesi . We’ve seen the bones of the forearm, the radius and ulna. That’s it for bony remains: no other bones have been found.

Yesterday, we looked at (mostly) the humerus of the Wealden sauropod “ Pelorosaurus ” becklesii , which you will recall is known from humerus, radius, ulna and a skin impression, and — whatever it might be — is certainly not a species of Pelorosaurus . Now let’s look at the radius and ulna.

It’s an oddity that in eight years of SV-POW!, we’ve never written about one of the best of all the Wealden-formation sauropod specimens: the forelimb and associated skin impression NHMUK R1870 that is known as “ Pelorosaurus ” becklesii . Let’s fix that.

If you’ll forgive me a rather self-indulgent post, the neck-anatomy paper that I and Matt recently had published in PeerJ is important to me for three reasons beyond the usual satisfaction of getting a piece of work out in a good journal.

A package!  A package has arrived!

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Why did sauropods have such long necks? It’s the single most obvious and important question about sauropods, so it’s a bit surprising to think that we’ve never really addressed this question directly.

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