Vanessa Graff and I spent yesterday working in the herpetology and ornithology collections at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (LACM). The herpetology collections manager, Neftali Comacho, pointed us to this skull of Alligator mississippiensis . It’s not world’s biggest gator–about which more in a second–but it’s the biggest I’ve seen in person.

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?

Why we do mass estimates Mass estimates are a big deal in paleobiology.

Lovers of fine sauropods will be well aware that, along with the inadequately described Indian titanosaur Bruhathkayosarus , the other of the truly super-giant sauropods is Amphicoelias fragillimus .  Known only from a single neural arch of a dorsal vertebra, which was figured and briefly described by Cope (1878) and almost immediately either lost or destroyed, it’s the classic “one that got away”, the animal that sauropod

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.

At the 2007 SVP meeting in Austin, Texas, I noticed that the suffix “-ass” was ubiquitiously used as a modifier: where an Englishman such as myself might say “This beer is very expensive”, a Texan would say “That is one expensive-ass beer” — and the disease seemed to spread by osmosis through the delegates, so that by my last day in Austin is was seemingly impossible to hear an adjective without the “-ass” suffix.

Here’s a skeletal reconstruction of Alamosaurus modified from Lehman and Coulson (2002:fig. 11). I cloned the neck and rotated it a few degrees to see where it would put the head. The skeleton in the figure is scaled to the size of the individuals in the Smithsonian and at UT Austin.

Here’s the answer to last week’s riddle. The big vertebra was obviously cervical 8 of Sauroposeidon , which you’ve seen here more than once. The small vertebra is also a mid-cervical, also from the Early Cretaceous, but from Croatia rather than Oklahoma. The very long centrum, unbifurcated neural spine, and extensive pneumatic sculpturing mark it as a brachiosaurid.

A while back, Matt speculated on the size of the allegedly giant mamenchisaurid Hudiesaurus .  At the time, all he had to go on was Glut’s (2000) reproduction of half of Dong (1997:fig. 3), and a scalebar whose length was given incorrectly.  The comments on that article gave some more measurements, but we never got around to showing you the figures of the vertebra in question, so here it is: Hudiesaurus sinojapanorum IVPP V.

We warned you that the Awesome was coming … now it’s here.  The first installment of Awesome, anyway, and there’s plenty more to come. Matt and I have just returned from a nine-day trip to Germany that was pretty much Heaven-on-Earth for us.  The first three days were spent in Bonn, at the first open workshop of the DFG-funded Biology of the sauropod dinosaurs: the evolution of gigantism project.