I drew a couple of these a while back, and I’m posting them now both to fire discussion and because I’m too lazy to write anything new.

Last week, for the first time ever, I spent the entire working week on palaeo.  I took a week away from my job, and spent it staying in London, working on the Archbishop at the Natural History Museum.

Get on over to Art Evolved and scope out the sauroponderous Sauropod Gallery. It’s brobdingnaginormous. I don’t want to seem biased, but there’s a lot of hot brachiosaurian action on display.

This is part 3 of an emerging and occasional SV-POW!

Earlier this month Daniela Schwarz-Wings and colleagues published the first finite element analysis (FEA) of sauropod vertebrae (Schwarz-Wings et al. 2009). Above is one of the figures showing some of their results. Following standard convention, stresses are shown on a gradient with cooler colors indicating lower stresses and hotter colors indicating higher stresses.

UPDATE December 3, 2009 I screwed up, seriously. Tony Thulborn writes in a comment below to correct several gross errors I made in the original post. He’s right on every count. I have no defense, and I am terribly sorry, both to Tony and to everyone who ever has or ever will read this post.

One of the most bizarre of sauropods – and arguably one of the most bizarre of dinosaurs – is the Patagonian dicraeosaurid diplodocoid Amargasaurus cazaui Salgado & Bonaparte, 1991. Here’s a picture of a replica specimen, provided by Nizar Ibrahim.

After a completely barren 2008, this year is turning out to be a good one for me in terms of publications.  Today sees the publication of Taylor (2009b), entitled Electronic publication of nomenclatural acts is inevitable, and will be accepted by the taxonomic community with or without the endorsement of the code — one of those papers where, if you’ve read the title, you can skip the rest of the paper.

Just checking: no-one’s bored of brachiosaurs yet, are they? Thought not.  Right, then, here we go! Greg Paul’s (1988) study of the two “ Brachiosaurus ” species — the paper that proposed the subgenus Giraffatitan for the African species — noted that the trunk is proportionally longer in Brachiosaurus than in Giraffatitan due to the greater length of its dorsal centra.

These are the days of miracle and wonder, especially for all you right-minded people out there who are lovers of fine brachiosaurs.