Last time I promised you exciting news about sauropod neck-muscle mass. Let none say that I do not fulfil covenents. And, as usual, when talking about sauropod neck muscle mass, I’m going to start by talking about bird legs. Look at this flamingo: Ridiculous, right? Those legs are like matchsticks. How can they possibly work. Where are the muscles? And the answer of course is that they’re on this ostrich: Check out those huge drumsticks!

I don’t remember now when I first noticed bifurcated cervical ribs in apatosaurines. I imagine 2016 at the latest, because on our Sauropocalypse that year Mike and I saw examples at both BYU and Dinosaur Journey.

Here are some cervical ribs of sauropods that show a spectrum of morphologies, from a low dorsal process that makes an obtuse angle with the shaft of the rib in Dicraeosaurus (upper right), to one that makes a right angle in Brontosaurus (center), to a prominent spike of bone in Apatosaurus (bottom left), to a […]

Everybody(*) knows that the turiasaurian sauropod Moabosaurus has bifurcated cervical ribs: it was all anyone was talking about back when that animal was described (Britt et al. 2017). We’ve featured the best rib here before, and here it is again: (*) All right, but you know what I mean.

I haven’t blogged about blogging in a while. Maybe because blogging already feels distinctly old-fashioned in the broader culture. A lot of the active discussion migrated away a long time ago, to Facebook and Twitter, and then to other social media outlets as each one in turn goes over the enshittification event horizon.

New paper out today in PeerJ: Lei R, Tschopp E, Hendrickx C, Wedel MJ, Norell M, Hone DWE. 2023. Bite and tooth marks on sauropod dinosaurs from the Morrison Formation. PeerJ 11:e16327 http://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.16327 This one had a long gestation.

Back in 2013, we showed you Bob Nicholls’ beautiful sketch “The Giant & Company”, featuring a giant Apatosaurus with a shaggy beard running along its neck.

I’ve been away for two weeks with Fiona in Kefalonia, one of the Greek islands. While we were there, we ate this excellent meal: Excellent Greek meal. Back row: grilled octopus; middle row (left to right): sardines, shrimp saganaki;

Utahraptor is a “giant” dromaeosaurid from Utah, described by Kirkland et al. (1993). Famously, its existence was part of the reason that the people making Jurassic Park felt at liberty to make their “Velociraptor” individuals not only much bigger than the turkey-sized Velociraptor proper, but also than than sheep-sized Deinonychus.

As all good SV-POW! regulars will know, Elmer S. Riggs published the name Brachiosaurus altothorax in a short (but not trival) 1903 paper (Riggs 1903) and followed it up with a proper descriptive monograph (Riggs 1904) that had several useful plates. I’ve never seen a real copy of the latter (or indeed the former), so for the last quarter-century I’ve made do with various low-quality photocopies and scans.

Last night I took some boxes out to our recycling bin, and as I was walking along the back fence I did a double-take — I’d walked within a couple of feet of this opossum before I knew it was there. It was so close that if I hadn’t been worried about either scaring it or getting bitten, I could easily have reached out and petted it like a cat. We both froze, and I whipped out my phone and started taking pictures.