MWC 861 in bone (left) and in bronze (right). Here’s a cool comparo.

Fig. 2. Rebbachisauridae indet. (MDPA-Pv 007) from the Sierra Chata locality (Candeleros Formation) Cenomanian (Upper Cretaceous). Anterior caudal vertebra in anterior ( A1 , A3 ), posterior ( A4 , A6 ), and left lateral ( A7 , A9 ) views.

Eoneophron , Parapropalaehoplophorus , Ia io , and friends The other day Mike wrote to me about the new Hell Creek oviraptorosaur Eoneophron (Atkins-Weltman et al. 2024), commenting that he liked the ‘eoneo’ — old new — part of the name. That sent me down a little etymological rabbit hole.

Just a quick post about the genesis of the Brachiosaurus rib paper (Taylor and Wedel 2023) that I wrote about at the very end of last year. Although this is in some respects a minor paper, I’m fond of it because it fell into place so quickly and easily.

As we’ve often observed, it’s a funny thing that incredibly well-known dinosaur specimens can sit around for decades, or for more than a century, before someone notices something fascinating about them. One lesson to learn from this is the importance of collections — their creation, maintenance and accessibility.

Let’s look again at Figure 7 of our recent paper on bifurcated cervical ribs in apatosaurines: In this figure, the red muscles (longus colli ventralis) are primarily ventral muscles used to draw the neck downwards, while the blue muscles (flexor colli lateralis) are primarily lateral muscles used to move the neck from side to side.

Back in the first post about our recent paper on bifurcated cervical ribs in apatosaurines, I noted: I’m fond of this one because it’s pleasingly low-tech and traditional.

Last time I promised you exciting news about sauropod neck-muscle mass. Let none say that I do not fulfil covenents. And, as usual, when talking about sauropod neck muscle mass, I’m going to start by talking about bird legs. Look at this flamingo: Ridiculous, right? Those legs are like matchsticks. How can they possibly work.

I don’t remember now when I first noticed bifurcated cervical ribs in apatosaurines. I imagine 2016 at the latest, because on our Sauropocalypse that year Mike and I saw examples at both BYU and Dinosaur Journey.

Bifurcated and incipiently bifurcated cervical ribs of sauropods. A , Moabosaurus utahensis holotype individual, left cervical rib BYU 14063 (not right as stated by Britt et al. 2017), probably associated with C5, in medial view. B , Dicraeosaurus hansemanni holotype MB.R.2379, right cervical rib 8 in lateral view. Modified from Janensch (1929, fig.

Everybody(*) knows that the turiasaurian sauropod Moabosaurus has bifurcated cervical ribs: it was all anyone was talking about back when that animal was described (Britt et al. 2017). We’ve featured the best rib here before, and here it is again: (*) All right, but you know what I mean.