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.

Now that the Xenoposeidon frenzy is over, we seem to be settling down to about one SV-POW! post per week … which on the face of it is not too unreasonable for a blog with “of the week” in its title.

Inspired by Mike’s recent post on the interior of Chondrosteosaurus from the Isle of Wight’s Wessex Formation, what could I do but weigh in yet again with one of my most-loved specimens: the beauty that is MIWG.7306 (aka ‘Angloposeidon’), a big brachiosaurid also from the Wessex Formation (Naish et al . 2004). As mentioned previously, it’s perhaps intuitively surprising that one of the most useful things about MIWG.7306 is that

My favorite room in the world is the big bone room at BYU’s Earth Science Museum.

After eight consecutive posts on Xenoposeidon , I have to admit that even I am getting just a tiny bit bored of it, so I can only imagine how the rest of you feel.

By now BMNH R2095 must be the best described, most pored-over 2/3 of a vertebra on the planet. What more can we possibly have to show you? How about this dandy poster for your living room wall, or the entrance to your corporate headquarters? And of course the obligatory rotating “3D” reconstruction… And a heretofore unpublicized life restoration, courtesy of Mike Taylor.

OK, so it’s actually day 7: I missed my deadline yesterday due to that unfortunate necessity, the day-job, which had me in meetings for half of the day and travelling for the other half. Yes, I could have written this post on the trains and planes, but I had my reasons. So here we are, at last.

So… you’re publishing a new, dead exciting and all round outstanding paper on a new dinosaur – like, let’s say, the new Hastings Beds Group neosauropod Xenoposeidon proneneukos Taylor & Naish, 2007 – what now?

[Sorry about the late posting today: I had to leave the house at 7:15 to fly to Copenhagen for Christmas lunch — long story — and I am completing today’s post from my hotel room.] There’s no getting away from it: everyone wants to know how big dinosaurs are. Xenoposeidon is based on a single partial vertebra, so there is no way to be at all sure about the size and shape of the whole animal;

Welcome to our continuing coverage of the wackiness that is Xenoposeidon . I drew the ‘pneumaticity’ straw, not surprisingly, so I get to introduce the anterior and posterior views of the vertebra, which reveal some of the internal structure. But they also reveal another bit of weirdness, which is the neural canal, so let’s start there.

So, by now, most people in the known universe have heard about Xenoposeidon , know what a big deal it is, and understand its immense value and significance.