Long-time SV-POW! readers will have detected a brachiosaurid bias in our writings, and this is for a good reason: it is because brachiosaurids are best. They just are.

Unbelievably, despite the fact that it is one of my favorite places in the world, despite the fact that it is just 10 fast hours away by car, across some of the most desolate and beautiful country on the planet, I have not been to BYU since the fall of 2005. The highlight of my last trip was spending a little quality time with the Dry Mesa Supersaurus cervical. You’ve seen it here before so you know it’s dimensions…sorta.

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I’m going to exploit this site to post a (very rare) off-topic book recommendation. So here it is: The Variety of Life — a survey and a celebration of all the creatures that have ever lived , by Colin Tudge. I’ve just finished reading this hefty book — 684 pages in the paperback edition — and I’ve found it fantastically invigorating.

Those of you who have been paying attention to my recent posts will have pretty much known this was coming.

There seems to be some kind of bell curve associated with sauropods. We get lots of medium-sized ones, but very few babies, mostly disarticulated bits, and very few super-immense ones, which are also mostly disarticulated bits. Puertasaurus is known from two vertebrae. Sauroposeidon is known from 3.5. The holotype of Hudiesaurus is a single vertebra;

Again, another exclusive peek at an interesting specimen: the MIWG.7306 vertebra, aka ‘Angloposeidon’ (Naish et al . 2004). Apologies if, by now, you’re bored of my show-casing of this specimen, but – not only is it the only sauropod vertebra of which I personally have multiple unpublished images – it is also a really nice demonstration of the fact that, even in just a single vertebra, there are multiple interesting, bizarre,

In the spirit of Your neck is pathetic and Your torso is also pretty lame, I note that your sacrum is negligible: We have here the sacrum of the Haplocanthosaurus priscus holotype CM 572, in ventral view with the ilia still in place (so that the slightly hourglass-shaped dark regions you see on either side are the acetabular regions of the ilia, facing downwards). To the right is the sacrum of a good-sized adult male human such as my

In a comment on the previous post, Amanda wrote: This might be a stupid question (I don’t really believe that there are no such things as stupid quetions) but do you find that sauropod vertebrae are more highly pneumatic in larger sauropods? This is not only not a dumb question, it is one of most important questions about pneumaticity in sauropods. The answer is complex, but here at SV-POW! we embrace the complexity.