Following on from Your neck is pathetic, I offer you the fifth presacral vertebra of the Brachiosaurus altithorax holotype specimen FMNH P25105, in right lateral view, with a complete human dorsal column for scale.

These are stressful times as SV-POW! towers, with all three of in various ways involved in the aetosaur ethics business that is — finally — getting the coverage that it deserves. So I don’t want to talk about that here, not only because it’s nothing to do with sauropod vertebrae but also because it’s getting a lot of coverage elsewhere.

Things are pretty quiet at SV-POW!

Inspired by Mike’s recent post on the interior of Chondrosteosaurus from the Isle of Wight’s Wessex Formation, what could I do but weigh in yet again with one of my most-loved specimens: the beauty that is MIWG.7306 (aka ‘Angloposeidon’), a big brachiosaurid also from the Wessex Formation (Naish et al . 2004). As mentioned previously, it’s perhaps intuitively surprising that one of the most useful things about MIWG.7306 is that

Figure 1. Sauroposeidon proteles , eighth cervical vertebra (top) and posterior portion of seventh cervical (bottom). Mike Taylor (left) and Matt Wedel (right) for scale.

In the last post, Matt promised you non-brachiosaurs, sacrals and caudals. And so I bring you the gift of … brachiosaur dorsals! Feast your eyes, gloat your soul, on the last four presacral vertebrapresacral vertebrae 4-7 of the Brachiosaurus altithorax holotype FMNH P25107.  [My mistake — for some reason, I called these the last four when I originally wrote this post.

This one’s not about the morphology of the vertebrae, but rather their cumulative effect. The subject is the mounted Brachiosaurus outside the Field Museum in Chicago. The picture was taken in July 2005 by me or by Mike; we had two Nikon Coolpix cameras going and just pooled the photos. We’ll get you some sacrals, caudals, and non-brachiosaurids one of these days. We swear.

Welcome to the third SV-POW! post. Given that this is my (me = Darren Naish) first post, I cannot resist using it as another excuse to post a picture of, and talk briefly about, the wonder that is MIWG.7306, the immense* brachiosaur cervical vertebra that I and colleagues described in 2004. A series of blog articles (on Tetrapod Zoology ver 1) were previously posted on this specimen and its history, starting here.