We have summer-house in the garden, divided into two rooms. One of the rooms functions as a shed: Among the many things in that shed, there’s some light scaffolding which we’ve used to paint the back of the house.

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: I saw this lying on the ground as my friend Nataley was playing a short set at a festival, and it immediately made me think of this:

Last time, I noted that photographs of the exact same object, even under the same lighting conditions, can come out different colours.

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 … I don’t trust that line of evidence as much as I might for two reasons.

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.

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.

You may recall that sculptor James Herrmann did a life-size bronze of Aquilops (shown above) back in 2017.

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.

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 […]

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.