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The hot news on the block right now is the description of the new sauropod Abydosaurus mcintoshi , which, amazingly, is known from four more or less complete skulls (Chure et al. 2010). This is unheard of — absolutely unprecedented. There are few enough sauropods for which a skull is known at all; but four of them, all in decent nick, is breathtaking.
Lovers of fine sauropods will be well aware that, along with the inadequately described Indian titanosaur Bruhathkayosarus , the other of the truly super-giant sauropods is Amphicoelias fragillimus . Known only from a single neural arch of a dorsal vertebra, which was figured and briefly described by Cope (1878) and almost immediately either lost or destroyed, it’s the classic “one that got away”, the animal that sauropod
Hat tip to Open Dinosaur Project contributor Rob Taylor, who drew my attention to this photo of a huge and sauropodoriffic snow sculpture at [what I thought when I wrote this was] the Fairbanks Ice Festival: {.size-full .wp-image-2537 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“2537” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2010/02/17/giant-snow-sauropods-of-the-fairbanks-ice-festival/dinosaurs/”
Since I started taking photographs of sauropod vertebrae back in 2004, I’ve got much, much better at it, and for the last few months I’ve been meaning to write an article about what I’ve learned along the way.
Here’s one of those text-light photo posts that we always aspire to but almost never achieve. In the spring of 2008 I flew to Utah to do some filming for the History Channel series “Evolve”, in particular the episode on size, which aired later that year. I always intended to post some pix from that trip once the show was done and out, and I’m just now getting around to it…a bit belatedly.
I hope you have a pair of 3D glasses.
[Hello to any redditors who have followed a link here. Please scroll down to find the more interesting articles; sorry that your introduction to SV-POW! is a backlink article.] Excuse the self-promotion, but some SV-POW! readers might be interested to know that I have an Ask Me Anything going over at the social news aggregator site reddit com.
In my not-long-quite-so-recent-any-more paper on Brachiosaurus and Giraffatitan , I gave as one of the autapomorphies of Brachiosaurus proper that the glenoid articular surface of its coracoid is laterally deflected. Although we’ve discussed this a little in comments on SV-POW!, it’s not yet made it into one of our actual articles.
The last time we talked about Alamosaurus, I promised to explain what the arrow in the above image is all about. The image above is a section through the cotyle (the bony socket of a ball-and-socket joint) at the end of one of the presacral vertebra.
It isn’t everyday that a sauropod vertebra makes it onto the cover of a technical journal. In fact… this might be the first time that it’s ever happened (please let us know if you know otherwise.