Just a quick note to let you know I (Mike) was interviewed for the Enlightenment podcast at The Twenty-First Floor, along with Dave “Archosaur Musings” Hone.  Dave’s segment is on common misconceptions about dinosaurs; long-time readers will be less than wholly astonished to learn that mine is on: sauropods. It probably won’t contain much that SV-POW!

This one’s mostly a housekeeping post, to keep you abreast of some notable developments with SV-POW!sketeers and friends. Added April 29 – I’m such a tool, forgot to mention that another awesomely niche-y blog has been unleashed on the paleo-blogosphere: March of the Fossil Penguins, by our friend and sometime sauropod-describer Dan Ksepka.

Here at SV-POW! Towers, we have often lamented that so much dinosaur research is locked up behind the paywalls of big for-profit commercial publishers, and that even work that’s been funded by public money is often not available to the public.

As often happens here, a comment thread got to be more interesting than the original post and ended up deserving a post of its own. In this case, I’m talking about the thread following the recent Mamenchisaurus tail club post, which got into some interesting territory regarding mass estimates for the largest sauropods.

Most people think of Janensch’s (1950b) plate VIII as being the first skeletal reconstruction of “ Brachiosaurus ” (although Janensch’s species “ Brachiosaurus ” brancai is now referred to the separate genus Giraffatitan ).  And it certainly is a classic: {.size-full .wp-image-2616 aria-describedby=“caption-attachment-2616” loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“2616”

Update This is an actual page from the late, lamented Weekly World News, from December 14, 1999. I always thought it was pretty darned funny that they had the alien remains discovered in the “belly” of an animal known only from neck vertebrae.

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Shunosaurus lii is a basal eusauropod from the Middle Jurassic of China.  Outside of palaeontological circles, it’s not at all well known — which is kind of surprising, as it’s one of the best represented of all sauropods.  It’s known from numerous complete skeletons, including skulls, and has been described in detail in Zhang’s (1988) monograph: 89 pages and 15 plates.

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