Up till now, I’ve tried to remain completely dispassionate about Aetogate, restricting my public comments to statements of fact and reports of what others have said.

If I say Amargasaurus cazaui , you say ‘long spines on cervical vertebrae’. Yes yes, it’s true that Amargasaurus had weird neck spines (and spines that, judging from their shape, really were spines rather than parts of continuous sail-like structures), but have you ever looked at its dorsals? That’s what we’re doing here: this is a posterior dorsal (from Salgado &

This one, obviously, is a follow-up to this one. Mark drew the picture, Mike had the idea, Mark gave the go-ahead, and here we are. Cry havoc and let slip the azhdarchids of war!

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Welcome to the third and climactic episode in my HMN SII:D8 trilogy. If the unique spinoparapophyseal lamina and total lack of infradiapophyseal laminae featured in the first two episodes were not enough to creep you out, then this ought to do it: the ACPLs of this vertebra have great big holes in them! Unfortunately, my photos of this are terrible.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the Humboldt bone-room … hot on the heels of Part 1: Spinoparapophyseal Laminae!, comes another dose of terror thanks to everyone’s favourite mid-to-posterior brachiosaurid dorsal vertebra, HMN SII:D8. First, here is a pretty picture of the whole vertebra in right lateral view: {.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-241 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“241”

Of all the sauropod vertebrae in the world, perhaps the single most intriguing is a dorsal vertebra of the Brachiosaurus brancai type specimen HMN SII. It was designated the 20th presacral (i.e. 7th dorsal) by Janensch (1950), but that was on the assumption that the dorsal column consisted of 11 vertebrae.

First, some horn-tooting. A few years ago I realized that I good lateral-view photos of lots of big stuff–a blue whale skeleton, a Brachiosaurus skeleton, a big bull elephant, myself–and I put together a composite picture that showed everything together and correctly scaled. Various iterations of the project, which I undertook solely for my own amusement, are here, here, and here.

In this article I’d like look at something that I’ve just spoken about at a conference: the ‘Dinosaurs – A Historical Perspective’ meeting held in London on May 6th and 7th (my thoughts on the conference can be found here and here). Mike attended too (and, like me, gave a talk), but Matt couldn’t make it. Anyway…