Do you want to know how stupid my co-blogger Matt Wedel is?  Having already discussed the ostrich Struthio camelus in Wedel et al. (2000b), that total idiot went on to misspell the trivial name as “ camellus ” in Wedel and Cifelli (2005:52).  What a doofus. And do you want to know how dumb my other co-blogger Darren Naish is?

OMG! WTF? Was I asleep? Had I slept? Did I miss something? Does paleontological training destroy the part of the brain that knows how to use a freakin’ tape measure? Are paleontologists incapable of imagining that others might want to make meaningful comparisons with their taxa?

I made this, just for the heck of it. {.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-923 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“923” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2009/03/16/brachiosaurus-both-bigger-and-smaller-than-you-think-incomplete/big-brachiosaurids-and-pathetic-mammals-480/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/big-brachiosaurids-and-pathetic-mammals-480.jpg” orig-size=“480,342” comments-opened=“1”

I ended the last post with this teaser: There is another sauropod (sort of) in Episode IV (sort of), but I’ll wait a week before I blab about that one. I wonder if anyone will guess what it is in the meantime? The mystery lasted all of a single comment.

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Brachiosaurus: uglier than you think (we’re sorry, but it’s true). UPDATE: Fig. 1 from Witmer (2001) showing hypothesized position of the fleshy nostrils in Brachiosaurus. How awesome was our trip to Germany?

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.

If you’re new to this thread, here’s a minimal reading list, in chronological order. I say ‘minimal’ because all of the relevant papers are freely available, and therefore all of the factual claims are easy to check.

{.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-302 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“302” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2008/09/03/theres-almost-nothing-but-nothing-there-brachiosaurus-edition/figure-12-brachiosaurus-ct-500/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/figure-12-brachiosaurus-ct-500.png” orig-size=“500,313” comments-opened=“1”

Considering how much time I’ve spent playing around mounted sauropod skeletons, I cannot believe it never occurred to me to do this: This is the mounted Brachiosaurus skeleton in the United terminal at Chicago O’Hare.