These are stressful times as SV-POW! towers, with all three of in various ways involved in the aetosaur ethics business that is — finally — getting the coverage that it deserves. So I don’t want to talk about that here, not only because it’s nothing to do with sauropod vertebrae but also because it’s getting a lot of coverage elsewhere.

I was going to write about mystery cervicals of the Cloverly Formation, but that requires knowing something about juvenile vertebrae and Pleurocoelus , so I decided to write about Pleurocoelus , but that still requires knowing something about juvenile vertebrae. So I’m writing this tutorial to lay the groundwork for more goodness to come.

Seeing the photograph in the last post of the Mamenchisaurus hochuanensis cast at the Field Museum in Chicago reminded me of a picture I’ve been meaning to post for a while. M.hoch, as I like to call it (we’re on familiar terms) is known primarily from its type specimen CCG V 20401, which was nicely described and figured by Young and Zhao in 1972.

In the last post, an astute commenter asked about Hudiesaurus : “A first dorsal 550 mm–isn’t that in Argentinosaurus territory?” Well, let’s find out. Hudiesaurus sinojapanorum was described by Dong (1997) based on a partial skeleton from the Kalazha Formation in China. The holotype, IVPP V 11120, is an anterior dorsal vertebra.

Futalognkosaurus dukei , just described last year, may be the most complete giant dinosaur ever discovered. Maybe. Depends on what you compare it to, and it also depends on how it’s measured. It’s hard to say right now because only one short paper on it has been published to date (Calvo et al. 2007), and it only includes one figure of the beast. Let’s take a look.

A hat-tip to Paul Barrett, who’s reminded us that technically we’re not supposed to be using photographs of Natural History Museum specimens — at least, not without acknowledgement.

Well, not really. Mike has been profiled on Science Careers. It’s a big lovefest for Mike, Darren, me, SV-POW!, the Dinosaur Mailing List, Xenoposeidon , Apatosaurus , father-son relationships, and science in general. And it’s all true.* * Actually, Mike would describe his day job differently. He’s a transponster!

A quick follow-up on Darren’s recent post: the reconstructed Argentinosaurus dorsal in the photo he used seems to be based on the anterior dorsal of the holotype — at the least, the proportions and most of the features are the same — so we can get some more information by looking at the figure of the same element in the description of Bonaparte and Coria (1993). Here it is: This shows the details better than the photo, though admittedly it’s

Newsflash: some sauropods were really, really big. But perhaps it’s not always obvious just how big some of them were… maybe this photo should help.

Things are pretty quiet at SV-POW!

The famous (infamous?) AMNH Barosaurus , from an angle you may not have seen before. There’s a very subtle problem here–both this skeleton (the “mommy”) and the juvenile hiding behind it (the “baby”) are reconstructed with 17 cervicals, although to the best of anyone’s knowledge, Barosaurus only had 16. Nitpicky? Sure.