If you don’t get to give a talk at a meeting, you get bumped down to a poster. That’s what’s happened to Matt, Darren and me at this year’s SVPCA, which is coming up next week.

Here is a fascinating sequence of five consecutive posterior dorsal vertebra — AMNH FARB 291 from the“Big Bone Room“ at the AMNH: {.wp-image-14329 .size-full aria-describedby=“caption-attachment-14329” loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“14329” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2017/08/15/biconcavoposeidon/figure-d-lateral-view-dscn6126/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/figure-d-lateral-view-dscn6126.jpeg” orig-size=“2203,754”

New goodies out today in PeerJ: Tschopp and Mateus (2017) on the new diplodocid Galeamopus pabsti, and Mannion et al. (2017) redescribe and name the French ‘Bothriospondylus’ as Vouivria damparisensis. Both papers are packed with interesting stuff that I simply don’t have time to discuss right now.

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Here I am at SVPCA in 2015. I am haunted by the fact that ten years ago at SVPCA 2005, I gave a talk about the NHM’s Tendaguru brachiosaurid, NHMUK R5937. And the description is still not done and submitted a full decade later.

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.

Introduction and Background I have three goals with this post: To document the range of variation in epipophyses in the cervical vertebrae of sauropods. To show that the “finger-like processes” overhanging the cervical postzygapophyses in the newly described Qijianglong are not novel or mysterious structures, just very well developed epipophyses.

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We’ve touched on this several times in various posts and comment threads, but it’s worth taking a moment to think in detail about the various published mass estimates for the single specimen MB.R.2181 (formerly known as HMN SII), the paralectotype of Giraffatitan brancai , which is the basis of the awesome mounted skeleton in Berlin.