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Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

SV-POW! ... All sauropod vertebrae, except when we're talking about Open Access. ISSN 3033-3695
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Published
Author Matt Wedel

Earlier this month Daniela Schwarz-Wings and colleagues published the first finite element analysis (FEA) of sauropod vertebrae (Schwarz-Wings et al. 2009). Above is one of the figures showing some of their results. Following standard convention, stresses are shown on a gradient with cooler colors indicating lower stresses and hotter colors indicating higher stresses.

Published
Author Matt Wedel

UPDATE December 3, 2009 I screwed up, seriously. Tony Thulborn writes in a comment below to correct several gross errors I made in the original post. He’s right on every count. I have no defense, and I am terribly sorry, both to Tony and to everyone who ever has or ever will read this post.

Published

After a completely barren 2008, this year is turning out to be a good one for me in terms of publications.  Today sees the publication of Taylor (2009b), entitled Electronic publication of nomenclatural acts is inevitable, and will be accepted by the taxonomic community with or without the endorsement of the code — one of those papers where, if you’ve read the title, you can skip the rest of the paper.

Published

Just checking: no-one’s bored of brachiosaurs yet, are they? Thought not.  Right, then, here we go! Greg Paul’s (1988) study of the two “ Brachiosaurus ” species — the paper that proposed the subgenus Giraffatitan for the African species — noted that the trunk is proportionally longer in Brachiosaurus than in Giraffatitan due to the greater length of its dorsal centra.