I see now that Mike has beaten me to the punch in providing your at-least-weekly dose of sauroponderous vertebrawesome. And a nice job it is. Still, I feel funny about you not getting a new picture (ahem), so I’m posting my late entry anyway. For some reason, despite–or perhaps because of–my ardent devotion to cervicals, I have taken it on myself to push the anatomical boundaries of SV-POW! again.

For the first time in SV-POW! history, a full week has passed between successive posts — well, at least we didn’t actually fail with the “of the week” part, even if it was a close thing. It’s been a busy week, for reasons that will soon be apparent;

It’s come up here a few times already–it’s hard to talk about sauropod vertebrae without bringing it up–but now it’s time to get it out in the open. In almost all sauropods, and certainly in all the ones you learned about as a kid, at least some of the vertebrae were pneumatic (air-filled). Now, this is a very strange thing.

Here is another beautiful but (so far) unidentifiable isolated dorsal vertebra from the Wealden Supergroup. Rather than the usual orthogonal views (anterior, posterior, lateral) this is in an oblique view: right anterolateral. This vertebra is one of two that, together, make up the specimen BMNH R90. For my own convenience I have assigned them lower-case latters so each can be referred to individually. I call this one R90a.

Welcome to another SV-POW! world first: the first ever outing (to my knowledge) of a photo of BMNH R5333, an articulated set of two-and-a-bit titanosaur caudal vertebrae. These vertebrae come from the famous Wessex Formation of the Isle of Wight: they are from the Lower Cretaceous, and specifically from the Barremian.

Figure 1. Sauroposeidon proteles , eighth cervical vertebra (top) and posterior portion of seventh cervical (bottom). Mike Taylor (left) and Matt Wedel (right) for scale.

We promised non-presacrals and non-brachiosaurids, so here’s a diplodocid caudal vertebra in right lateral view. Most of the neural spine is blown off. The huge hole in the side of the vert is legit, though. That’s a pneumatic foramen (literally, air hole), through which air-filled tubes connected to the respiratory system entered the bone–just like in birds. More on that later.

In the last post, Matt promised you non-brachiosaurs, sacrals and caudals. And so I bring you the gift of … brachiosaur dorsals! Feast your eyes, gloat your soul, on the last four presacral vertebrapresacral vertebrae 4-7 of the Brachiosaurus altithorax holotype FMNH P25107.  [My mistake — for some reason, I called these the last four when I originally wrote this post.

This one’s not about the morphology of the vertebrae, but rather their cumulative effect. The subject is the mounted Brachiosaurus outside the Field Museum in Chicago. The picture was taken in July 2005 by me or by Mike; we had two Nikon Coolpix cameras going and just pooled the photos. We’ll get you some sacrals, caudals, and non-brachiosaurids one of these days. We swear.

At the risk of turning this blog into Brachiosaurus brancai 8th Cervical Picture of the Day, here’s a quick tutorial on your basic sauropod vertebral anatomy, using everyone’s favourite cervical vertebra. This picture shows the same vertebra as was photographed in the very first SV-POW! entry.

Just a quick post to feed the desire for sheer sauropodous beauty. This picture shows a single partial vertebra in six different views.