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I’ve been taking a long-overdue look at some of the recently-described giant sauropods from China, trying to sort out just how big they were. Not a new pursuit for me, just one I hadn’t been back to in a while. Also, I’m not trying to debunk anything about this animal – as far as I know, there was no bunk to begin with – I’m just trying to get a handle on how big it might have been, for my own obscure purposes.

Last October, Mike posted a tutorial on how to choose a paper title, then followed it up by evaluating the titles of his own papers. He invited me to do the same for my papers. I waited a few days to allow myself to forget Mike’s comments on our joint papers – not too hard during my fall anatomy teaching – and then wrote down my thoughts. And then did nothing with them for three and a half months.

The Carnegie Quarry, at Dinosaur National Monument, near Jensen, Utah, is arguably the most impressive dinosaur-fossil exhibit anywhere in the world — a covered, semi-excavated quarry that’s absolutely packed with big dinosaur fossils. It’s also notoriously difficult to photograph: too big to fit into a single photo, and with poor contrast between the bones and matrix.

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It’s hard to believe it’s been nearly seven years since the “resolution”, if you want to call it that, of Aetogate, the aetosaur plagiarism-and-claim-jumping scandal. I was contacted privately today by someone wanting to know if I had copies of the SVP’s documents published in response to this. I didn’t — and the documents are hard to find since they have been moved at least twice from their original addresses on the SVP site.

According to Rare Historical Photos from the 1860s to the 1960s, this is the iceberg that sank the Titanic: {.size-full .wp-image-11501 aria-describedby=“caption-attachment-11501” loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“11501” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2015/02/13/the-titanic-was-sunk-by-an-apatosaurus-cervical/rare-historical-photos-16/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/rare-historical-photos-16.jpg”

Go to Google and do a picture search for “natural history museum”. Here are the results I get.

Having given pterosaurs all the glory in two earlier posts, it’s time to move yet further away from the sauropods we know and love, and look at epipophyses outside of Ornithodira.

This just in, from Zurriaguz and Powell’s (2015) hot-off-the-press paper describing the morphology and pneumatic features of the presacral column of the derived titanosaur Saltasaurus . (Thanks to Darren for bringing this paper to my attention.) Now, as everyone knows, titanosaurs don’t have epipophyses. In fact, they’re the one major sauropod group where Matt has not observed them. Until today.

It’s well known that there is good fossil material of the giant azhdarchid pterosaur Quetzalcoatlus out there, but that for various complicated reasons it’s yet to be published. But as part of our ongoing quest for pterosaur epipophyses, I have obtained these photos of a pretty well preserved single cervical, probably C3, which is either Quetzalcoatlus or something pretty darned close.