In my 2009 brachiosaur paper, I gave rather short shrift to the sacrum of Brachiosaurus — in part because there is no really good sacrum of Giraffatitan to compare it to. Also my own photos of the sacrum, taken back before I figured out how to photograph big bones, are all pretty terrible. Happily, Phil Mannion took some much better photos and gave us permission to use them.
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Last time, we saw why Haplocanthosaurus couldn’t be a juvenile of Apatosaurus or Diplodocus , based on osteology alone. But there’s more: Ontogenetic status of Haplocanthosaurus Here is where is gets really surreal.
In a new comment on an oldish post, Peter Adlam asked: I recently happened upon a picture of the late Jim Jenson standing beside the huge front leg of “Ultrasauros”, which leads me to ask a few questions. Did he really find a complete forelimb? Was the leg from Brachiosaurus altithorax?
Most people think of Janensch’s (1950b) plate VIII as being the first skeletal reconstruction of “ Brachiosaurus ” (although Janensch’s species “ Brachiosaurus ” brancai is now referred to the separate genus Giraffatitan ). And it certainly is a classic: {.size-full .wp-image-2616 aria-describedby=“caption-attachment-2616” loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“2616”
Update This is an actual page from the late, lamented Weekly World News, from December 14, 1999. I always thought it was pretty darned funny that they had the alien remains discovered in the “belly” of an animal known only from neck vertebrae.
The hot news on the block right now is the description of the new sauropod Abydosaurus mcintoshi , which, amazingly, is known from four more or less complete skulls (Chure et al. 2010). This is unheard of — absolutely unprecedented. There are few enough sauropods for which a skull is known at all; but four of them, all in decent nick, is breathtaking.
Since I started taking photographs of sauropod vertebrae back in 2004, I’ve got much, much better at it, and for the last few months I’ve been meaning to write an article about what I’ve learned along the way.
Here’s one of those text-light photo posts that we always aspire to but almost never achieve. In the spring of 2008 I flew to Utah to do some filming for the History Channel series “Evolve”, in particular the episode on size, which aired later that year. I always intended to post some pix from that trip once the show was done and out, and I’m just now getting around to it…a bit belatedly.
In my not-long-quite-so-recent-any-more paper on Brachiosaurus and Giraffatitan , I gave as one of the autapomorphies of Brachiosaurus proper that the glenoid articular surface of its coracoid is laterally deflected. Although we’ve discussed this a little in comments on SV-POW!, it’s not yet made it into one of our actual articles.