As Matt frequently reminds me, it’s now nearly five years since I started to work on “The Archbishop”, more formally known as BMNH R5973, the Natural History Museum’s long-neglected Tendaguru brachiosaur.  This is, or at least once was, one of the most complete brachiosaurid specimens ever discovered — although quite a bit of the material has gone missing or remains unprepared.

Isn’t this a beauty?

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I made this, just for the heck of it. {.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-923 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“923” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2009/03/16/brachiosaurus-both-bigger-and-smaller-than-you-think-incomplete/big-brachiosaurids-and-pathetic-mammals-480/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/big-brachiosaurids-and-pathetic-mammals-480.jpg” orig-size=“480,342” comments-opened=“1”

We have sometimes neglected tails on SV-POW!, in favour of the more obviously charismatic charms of presacral vertebrae, but every now and then you come across a caudal vertebra so bizarre that it just cries out to be blogged.

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New hotness out today: Miragaia , a new long-necked stegosaur from the Late Jurassic of Portugal (Mateus et al. 2009). What is “long-necked” for a stegosaur? In this case, well over a meter! That may not sound too impressive for those of you who have gotten complacent about 10-meter-plus sauropod necks, but it’s a big deal.

UPDATE: Oops, I’m a moron. I wrote this post at work (on my lunch hour!) and didn’t realize that I had free access to the Wiley stuff because I was at work. I can’t get them from home either.

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It’s been a while since we looked at everybody’s favourite partial dorsal vertebra, and there may be those who feel we’ve said all that can be said about it, but there is one feature of Xenoposeidon that we’ve never really highlighted here and which is well worth a look.

I had a new paper come out today. Unofficial supplementary info here, PDF here. I would have had all this ready to go sooner, but the paper came out sooner than I expected. In fact, I didn’t even know that it had been published until Andy Farke (aka the Open Source Paleontologist) wrote me for a PDF. Turnabout’s fair play, I suppose, because last year I congratulated Stuart Sumida on his Gerobatrachus paper before he knew it was out.