We have summer-house in the garden, divided into two rooms.

Since the previous installment of this epic, we’ve taken two brief digressions on how little importance we should attach the colours of bones in our photographs when trying to determine whether they’re from the same individual: cameras do lie, and in any case different bones of the same individual can age differently.

I’ll see your face-of-the-blessed-virgin-in-a-waffle and raise you the fourth dorsal vertebra of the Giraffatitan brancai paralectotype BM.R.2181 (formerly HMN S II) in a dandelion leaf: {.alignnone .size-full .wp-image-16141 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“16141” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2019/06/30/its-a-miracle/img_20190629_131844/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/img_20190629_131844.jpg”

Last time, I noted that photographs of the exact same object, even under the same lighting conditions, can come out different colours. That is one of the two reasons why I am not persuaded that the very different colours of my photos of the two Supersaurus scapulae is strong evidence that they are from different individuals.

In part 5 of the Supersaurus series, I made the point that my photos of Scap A and Scap B seem to show them as being very different colours, suggesting different preservation. However … The first of these points has just been brought home to me by an unrelated experience. The rendering on an outside wall of our house had come loose, and needed to be removed and replaced.

When I started this series, it wasn’t going to be a series at all. I thought it was going to be a single post, hence the title that refers to all three of Jensen’s 1985 sauropods even though most of the posts so far have been only about Supersaurus . The tale seems to have grown in the telling. But we really are getting towards the end now.

Before we get on to the home stretch of this series — which is turning out waaay longer than I expected it to be, and which I guess should really have been a paper instead — we need to resolve an important detail. We all know there are two scapulocoracoids in the BYU Supersaurus material, and that one of them is the holotype: but which one?

{.size-large .wp-image-13981 .aligncenter loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“13981” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2017/04/22/there-has-been-an-aquilopsing-have-you-felt-it/d97p5158-large/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/d97p5158-large.jpeg” orig-size=“1280,853” comments-opened=“1” image-meta=“{"aperture":"14","credit":"Jeff Sabo","camera":"Canon EOS-1D X","caption":"","created_timestamp":"1491991896","copyright":"Jeff

Here’s a bit of light relief, in the middle of all those looong posts about Supersaurus and its buddies. When Matt and I were at NAMAL on the last day of the 2016 Sauropocalypse, we took a bunch of tourist shots. Two of them were of a skull and first three cervical vertebrae from what I take to be Diplodocus or something close, and happened to be from sufficiently close angles that they make a pretty good anaglyph.

Having surveyed what we know from the published literature about Jensen’s Big Three sauropods, and what Matt and I concluded about its big cervical BYU 9024, and having thought a bit more about the size of the BYU 9024 animal, we’re getting to the point where we can consider what all this means for Jensen’s taxa.

In part 2, we concluded that BYU 9024, the large cervical vertebra assigned by Jensen to the Supersaurus holotype individual, is in fact a perfectly well-behaved Barosaurus cervical — just a much, much bigger one than we’ve been used to seeing.