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.

At the risk of turning this blog into Brachiosaurus brancai 8th Cervical Picture of the Day, here’s a quick tutorial on your basic sauropod vertebral anatomy, using everyone’s favourite cervical vertebra. This picture shows the same vertebra as was photographed in the very first SV-POW! entry.

Howdy, Matt Wedel here. This is the Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week (or SV-POW! as we like to call it), and you just got a post yesterday, so what are we doing back here already? Mike and Darren and I are trying to get SV-POW! up and running as quickly and smoothly as possible, and the best way to do that is to post. And as long as we’re posting, we might as well get a little work done, too.