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Have we ever posted decent photos of the Brachiosaurus altithorax caudals? Has anyone? I can’t remember either thing ever happening.

We all know that apatosaurines have big honkin’ cervical ribs (well, most of us know that). But did they also have unusually large neural spines? The question occurred to me the other day when I was driving home from work.

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A couple of months ago, Darren (the silent partner in the SV-POW!

I’ve been taking a long-overdue look at some of the recently-described giant sauropods from China, trying to sort out just how big they were. Not a new pursuit for me, just one I hadn’t been back to in a while. Also, I’m not trying to debunk anything about this animal – as far as I know, there was no bunk to begin with – I’m just trying to get a handle on how big it might have been, for my own obscure purposes.

This was inspired by an email Mike sent a couple of days ago: I replied that I was indeed freaked out, and that it had given me an idea for a post, which you are now reading. I didn’t have a Giraffatitan that was sufficiently distortion-free, so I used my old trusty Brachiosaurus . The vertebra you see there next to Mike and next to the neck of Brachiosaurus is BYU 9024, the longest vertebra that has ever been

This is BYU 12867–you’ve seen it here before–in dorsal view. It’s not a brilliant shot–I took it through the glass of the display case while filming a documentary at the North American Museum of Ancient Life in Lehi, Utah, in 2008. Centrum length is 94 cm, total length with the overhanging prezygapophyses is over a meter.

As promised, some thoughts on the various new brachiosaur mass estimates in recent papers and blog-posts. Back in 2008, when I did the GDI of Giraffatitan and Brachiosaurus for my 2009 paper on those genera, I came out with estimates of 28688 and 23337 kg respectively. At the time I said to Matt that I was suspicious of those numbers because they seemed too low.