You’d think that in 100+ posts we’d be starting to exhaust the territory, but there are vast swaths of sauropod vertebral morphology that we haven’t even touched. Like fused vertebrae. Sauropods fused their vertebrae all the time. Some of those fusions are age-related, many are pathological, and some are…hard to classify.
So, 2008 has come and gone. Was it a good year for sauropods? In terms of new taxa, it wasn’t amazing, but it wasn’t too bad, and (as we’ll see in this and a few following posts) some of the taxa involved had pretty interesting vertebrae.
In the last post I introduced Aerosteon , which has been touted as providing the first solid evidence for bird-like air sacs in non-avian dinosaurs, and I explained a little about how we know what we think we know about dinosaur air sacs.
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It’s very rare that all three of us SV-POW!ers get together: in fact, until Tuesday this week, it had only ever happened once, at SVPCA 2005. But as Matt was spending nearly a fortnight with me (Mike) in England, far from his native land — an unholy blend of Oklahoma and California — it would have been stupid not to have all got together.
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Long-time SV-POW! readers will have detected a brachiosaurid bias in our writings, and this is for a good reason: it is because brachiosaurids are best. They just are.
Those of you who have been paying attention to my recent posts will have pretty much known this was coming.